It Might Have Been
by DeejayMil
Summary: Emily was winter. She was a red scarf and the bitter December wind. She was always at his back, even without checking, and he was fearless with her beside him. She was all poise and cat-like confidence, and he tumbled gladly into loving her. / Emily was winter, and they buried her in the spring. / It took till fall to remember that winter always returned.
1. Winter

" _Of all the words of mice and men, the saddest are, "It might have been."_

Kurt Vonnegut

 **.**

 **Chapter One – Winter**

 **.**

 **.**

Haley was summer.

She was Jack at the beach for the first time, disbelieving that anything could be as endless as the ocean. She was hair turned golden by the hot sun. She was warmth and coming home to the sound of crickets' songs floating through the house through windows left open to coax in a stray breeze.

Haley was summer, and summer was ending.

After Haley, Jack asked to be read to. Hotch wasn't yet at the point where he could say no to his son, not when Haley's blood still stained his hands, and he'd have given him so much more than just a story if he could. But he couldn't, no one could, and so he read.

' _Summer is over and gone,' they sang,_ he read without flinching, and the crickets in the grass outside Jack's open window mocked him by reading along. _'Over and gone, over and gone. Summer is dying, dying.'_

He'd stop reading eventually and Jack would ask him why Charlotte had to die.

He never really worked out how to answer that.

 **.**

* * *

 **.**

When Emily had begun at the BAU, she'd immediately pegged Aaron Hotchner as the kind of man who refused to allow himself to feel emotions. Everything, from his meticulously ironed shirts to his meticulously expressionless face, screamed _'I am seriously repressing some shit.'_

And Emily was not the kind of woman who found that sexy. She didn't need her men brooding or damaged or grim.

As it turned out, she was wrong a lot when it came to this particular man.

Aaron Hotchner was many, many things—damaged and brooding were very likely two of those things—but emotionless was most certainly not one of them.

He laughed on the jet. It was one laugh, and she'd heard him laugh before, but there was something different about this one. She couldn't remember what it was about, only that Reid had caused it, and looked shyly delighted to have done so. She couldn't remember what day it was, or the case, or even what any of them were wearing on that particular trip.

She remembered the laugh, because it was startled and real, and they joined in because it was impossible not to.

She remembered the laugh because that was the day she realized he was exactly her kind of sexy.

 **.**

* * *

 **.**

The first day of winter, she'd asked him offhand about a book. He'd answered without thinking, stating he hadn't read it.

"I don't find much time to read," he'd said to her with a tired smile from across his desk. She'd leaned back in the chair and smiled tightly and hadn't mentioned it again.

The next day, she dropped the book onto his files. "I believe," she said with a grin, and later he'd note that the book smelled of her perfume, "That you should always find time to read. It's one of the few things people should always find time for."

She'd left without another word and he found himself carrying the book home that night tucked in his hand against his coat. It found its way to the kitchen counter while he cooked dinner, and he paged through the first chapter curiously as the soup bubbled and Jack babbled about his day at school.

It found its way to the living room coffee table as Jack did his geography homework on the floor, his books and pens and maps strewn around him and making him look startlingly like Reid during a case. Hotch read the next two chapters on a whim while Jack patiently outlined each letter on his poster of the world in different coloured glitter pen.

It found its way, finally, to his bedside cupboard, and he stayed up almost irresponsibly late to finish it. He fell asleep with the book on his chest, and it slipped down the side of his bed to fall open on a singular passage when he awoke.

 _A purpose of human life, no matter who is controlling it, is to love whoever is around to be loved._

He handed her back the book that day and she was startled that he'd finished it already.

"I made the time," he said, and for some reason she flushed and looked down and away.

 **.**

* * *

 **.**

It was the second day of winter, and the beginning.

She blamed it on the alcohol, but she was pretty sure it was entirely her fault.

They went out after a case, a horrible case—but weren't they all? —and even JJ was drinking quicker than usual, her blue eyes sombre. Morgan and Rossi both vanished within the hour, off to ply the women of the bar, and Reid vanished within the next, off to find a wall to hide against. She drunk one drink probably named after a sex position or weapon, and then drunk another because it stopped tasting shit after the fourth mouthful.

Then she went to find Reid, because he'd looked ill lately and she was a natural, secret, worrier. She'd never tell him that though.

"Drink this," she instructed him when she found him, as expected, curled up in a corner booth with a scotch and a book. He stared at the drink offered, and she held it up and watched his face waver through the pink liquid.

"It's pink," he stated bluntly, and took the glass. One eyebrow shot up. _You learned that from Hotch,_ she thought with a silent laugh, followed by, _I wonder where Hotch is,_ followed shortly once more by, _don't go and find him, Prentiss, you're drunk._

"No shit," she said instead of walking away, and sat next to him heavily. "It tastes great," she lied moments after, even though it was mean, because he always looked so woeful when he was playfully sad, and she liked seeing that expression on him.

The pink vanished in a long swallow, and she tried and failed not to laugh as his throat worked to understand what he'd just consumed, his eyes widening. He choked. "That's awful," he spluttered, reaching for his scotch to chase it. Which, as she could probably warn him but wouldn't, would just make it worse. "Who drinks that stuff?"

"Drunk co-eds," she answered cheerfully, and turned to sweep her gaze across the bar. "Want another? My treat."

"Please, no. Hotch is over there, by the dartboard. Watching JJ be aggressively competent at darts."

Ice dropped down her spine even as there was an oddly warm thrill in her stomach at the sight of Hotch, his suit jacket off and sleeves almost temptingly rolled up, smiling and taking the offered dart from JJ. "I wasn't looking for Hotch," she lied again, because it seemed to be the night for it, and Reid couldn't tell.

It was a sign of how messed up she could be that sometimes she lied just to make sure she still could. Working with profilers tended to encourage paranoia like that.

"Uh huh," Reid said with an uncharacteristic edge of sarcasm to his tone. "You should have another. If you're sufficiently intoxicated, he won't let you walk home alone. Well, he won't let you walk home alone anyway, but if you're drunk he'll walk you all the way to the door."

She turned to eyeball her friend as he gazed down glumly into the depths of his empty glass. "You hate scotch," she said finally, taking the glass from him and sliding it across the table, leaving a sticky trail of condensation in its wake. "And how many have you had?"

"More than Hotch, less than you," he answered just as quickly, and stood. "Want another? And when I say another, I mean something that isn't quite so… incandescent."

That wasn't actually what he was asking. He wasn't asking _would you like another drink_ , or rather he was, he was just layering it over the unspoken _are you going to take my advice._

"How many drinks until what you're suggesting sounds like a good idea?" she asked instead, and leaned back to let him sidle past out of the booth.

A careless shrug was his answer.

But he bought her the drink anyway.

 **.**

* * *

 **.**

When he went to find Prentiss and Reid to bid them goodnight, he found them both in the state of what Rossi would politely call 'absolutely wankered.'

"Oh dear," Rossi himself said happily, appearing behind Hotch and bringing with him a noticeable waft of whiskey and perfume that Hotch was at least eighty percent sure wasn't his. "Well, we could just pour them both into a taxi and hope for the best."

"I'm fine," Reid protested, and attempted to stand. Then, just as ineffectively, attempted to fall. Hotch would only call it an attempt because halfway through falling down, he seemed to become aware that he was falling, and tried to stop. This resulted in him, half-leaning over, frowning really hard as though he was concentrating on something very important.

And then just kind of… slumped. Onto Prentiss. Who completely failed to catch him, and instead just laughed helplessly at him as he slid the rest of the way to the floor and blinked sadly up at them, the BAU's very own inebriated genius.

Hotch was proud of his team, every day. And they just kept doing things to remind him of that.

"Good lord," said JJ from somewhere, followed by, "I'll take Reid. Rossi, you should…"

"Go and find my date and vanish from here before I'm given babysitting duties." Hotch turned before Rossi was finished talking, and the man was already gone. Morgan smiled, nodded as though he was about to offer a solution, and then vanished just as quickly.

"Oh well," JJ said brightly. "I'll still take Reid. Hotch, Emily only lives a few blocks from here. I don't suppose…"

Emily stood, with considerable more success than Reid had. Judging from the thump and the yelp from her knees, Reid had just failed at doing so again, and possibly head-butted the table. "I am _fine_ ," she enunciated clearly, and picked up her coat. Hotch watched as she put on the coat, just as easily, and wrapped her scarf neatly around her neck with fingers that didn't fumble, despite the red flush to her cheeks and the impressively large amount of beer bottles on the table that he knew for a fact weren't Reid's.

It occurred to Hotch in that moment that he was very likely getting the best of this deal.

"Good," he said, and reached out as though to take her arm and help her out of the booth out of instinct. She quirked a curious eyebrow at the gesture, and he changed it to brush his fingers over the elbow of her coat, brushing away imaginary lint.

They both shivered at the touch, and he felt it through her arm.

"You won't mind me walking you home then," he added, and his voice was far lower than he'd intended it to be.

When she nodded slowly and stepped out to follow him, he could have sworn he saw Reid smile.

 **.**

* * *

 **.**

Her head was spinning until they stepped out into the cool air and the silence of the night, and then everything turned sharp and real.

They walked in silence. Neither spoke. The stars glinted ahead, brighter than usual as though the chill of the coming winter was giving them strength, and their breath fogged in front of their faces.

Hotch hunched his shoulders into his coat, and tied a scarf around his neck, and she curled her fingers in her pockets and imagined twining them through his hair. The cars they walked past glistened, their windows just barely frosted at the edges and everything felt… clean.

New.

It felt like the start of something.

"You don't have to walk me all the way up," she said outside her door, and watched his gaze trace her posture as though gauging her level of sobriety. Then it traced her again, and there was something darker in the look.

She shivered.

"No," he said quietly. "I don't."

But he did.

 **.**

* * *

 **.**

It was the first time and it was entirely his fault.

She was gorgeous in the moonlight. She was pale skin framed by dark hair, and her eyes were endless. He never had a chance.

He walked her to her door. When she held it open, neither of them spoke.

When she closed it behind him and turned, he already had his hands on her hips, drawing her forward against his body. She was warm and cold all at once; her skin hot under his fingers when he slipped them into her shirt, and her cheek cool against his as she pressed her lips to his ear and just _breathed._

He took her to bed and neither of them spoke because there weren't words for this.

He took her to bed, and then he took her apart and himself alongside her.

"This is my fault," he told her once, as the yellow light through the window caught her skin as she moved above him.

"Entirely," she agreed, and dragged her nails gently against his skin.

He never regretted it.

 **.**

* * *

 **.**

It didn't change anything between them at work. He was still ridiculously professional; she was still compartmentalized. They didn't linger about each other. When one of them found themselves at the wrong end of a gun—and that happened far too often but never became less frightening—the other didn't give them away.

The team found out anyway.

Spencer was the first and she wasn't surprised because of course he was.

"How was Hotch last night?" he asked smugly, the night after, and she considered tipping his coffee into his lap.

"Want details?" she replied instead, and he quickly changed the subject.

She was pretty sure Rossi was next because two weeks later she sneezed and Hotch said _bless you_ , and that, bizarrely, led to David fucking Rossi lifting his nose out of his report, raising an eyebrow and saying _ahh_ in the kind of revolutionary tone that suggested he'd just won money.

Her phone beeped two hours later.

 _ **Bossman: Come to dinner tonight.**_

She replied with a pert message that both agreed and hinted at the possibility of what he could do _after_ that dinner. It was cocky. It was brash.

She was mortified as soon as she sent it.

He didn't reply.

He brushed by her while she was refilling her coffee, and she only realized it was him because only he could move so quietly that she hadn't noticed he was there until their elbows were knocking together.

"Pass a mug, please?" he asked politely, and in the same tone of voice continued with, "Come to dinner, and I'll show you what I intend to do _after_."

Then he smiled and her throat went dry.

Well, shit.

"In way over your head, Prentiss," she muttered after he'd ghosted away, but she was grinning anyway.

 **.**

* * *

 **.**

The first snow of the season and they were out in it because Emily was actually insane and Hotch couldn't say no to her.

"Where do the ducks go when it snows?" Jack asked glumly, examining the frozen pond.

"Australia," Emily said, ducking to fiddle with her bootlace and giving Hotch the opportunity to examine the curve of her leg. Just her leg. He coughed and averted his gaze quickly, earning himself a glance from her as she frowned at him suspiciously. "Clever them. Aaron, you're dressed for work."

He looked down at himself. "I'm… dressed," he protested, smoothing a hand down his tie. "I didn't realize we were going for a romp in the snow."

Jack bounded away, eyes intent on what could possibly be a duck—but which Hotch knew was just a shadow shaped like a duck just to tease the kid—and Emily tucked her hands behind her back and smiled sweetly at him.

He didn't trust that smile an inch.

"What?" he asked, looking down at his suit again, and looking up just in time to receive a face full of snow. He shook it out of his eyes with a gasp at the icy touch, and found her inches from his face and grinning like a cat.

"Oops," she murmured against his mouth, and kissed him. Once, and twice, and then one more time.

Then she shoved him into a snowdrift.

He didn't get up immediately despite the cold, because sitting there with her laughing and Jack joining in, he realized that he'd felt like this before.

And it was terrifying.

 **.**

* * *

 **.**

"He smiles more now," Reid said one day, glancing across the jet to where Hotch and JJ had their heads together over a case file.

"Guess Rossi finally succeeded in getting the stick out," she replied, turning his attention back to their chess game.

Reid put her into check, and shrugged. "Nah," he said, tapping on the board with his long fingers. "He's… happy. You are too."

She took his knight, sensed the game was probably nearing a defeat for her and rolled her eyes. "What are you, my shrink?"

Checkmate. What she liked about Reid was that he was never smug about winning, or bitter about losing. He just took what came to him and made what he could of it. "Your friend," he said softly. "Who is very happy for you."

She didn't reply that that, because what the fuck could she say?

 **.**

* * *

 **.**

One night a week of them having dinner out became two. Became three.

Became her coming home to his house and sitting at the kitchen table with Jack talking about homework while he cooked for them both.

And that became her staying after to watch a movie with them until Jack went to sleep.

Somehow, eventually, that became her carrying Jack to bed while Hotch folded the covers back for her to slip his sleepy son in between the sheets. Hotch watched as Jack linked his arms dreamily around Emily's neck as she leaned over him, brushed his lips against her cheek and murmured _guh'night._

It hurt just as much as it healed.

She stayed again that night and he undressed her with the kind of care one took with something precious.

"Being very cautious tonight, aren't you?" she asked when his head was against her thigh and her body was shaking. "I'm not going to break, Aaron."

He wasn't quite as confident in her immortality as she seemed to be.

 **.**

* * *

 **.**

She was the first, and it was an accident.

He was in front of the fire, wearing the clothes she described fondly as 'comfy' and which she'd never tell him how much she liked because of the way they clung to his ass and legs.

He was wearing his reading glasses and she'd also never admit how much she liked that either. She had to have some cards to play.

Instead, she walked into the room, tilted his head back with one hand cupped around his cheek, and kissed him wordlessly.

"What was that for?" he asked when they broke apart, flushed and dark-eyed.

"Because I love you," she said, and then blinked.

She hadn't meant to say it.

"Oh," he said. His glasses had slipped down his nose some. She fought the urge to push them back up for him. He didn't answer, just kissed her again. Pulled her into his lap. He didn't seem sorry she'd said it, although he didn't say it back, even as they rediscovered each other in the glow of the fire.

And nothing really changed beyond that.

 **.**

* * *

 **.**

He asked her to spend Christmas with them. She accepted.

"Emily is going to come over for Christmas dinner, after Jessica and Grandpa go home, okay?" he asked Jack, and Jack looked at him strangely from the picture he was drawing.

"Of course she is," he said matter-of-factly, and went back to his work.

She came and she brought a ridiculous bobble hat for him, a book of heroes for Jack, and the oddest sensation of home.

 **.**

* * *

 **.**

Time passed and brought with it change. For once, very little of it was bad.

She became so used to Jack slipping his hand into hers when the three of them walked together that even when Aaron and his son weren't with her, she caught herself looking down for him at the crosswalk. Time brought with it a bed that wasn't empty anymore, and her seriously considering introducing Sergio to Jack just so her poor cat wasn't on his own so much anymore.

Time brought with it the first flush of lust which turned to something more like love, which quickly and almost too soon settled into something that was almost… normal. Family. Dishes together and teaching Jack to count and sometimes, sometimes, thinking of the future.

It started with sex and became waking up with a heart beating against her back to remind her she wasn't alone.

She finally relaxed.

 **.**

* * *

 **.**

Emily was winter.

She was a red scarf pulled tight around a pale neck, laugh cutting off into a sharp _fuck_ as she stepped out of the SUV into the bitter December wind. She was shivering on a case because her coat was a shade too thin, and smirking while she declined the offer of taking his. She was a gasp as the blankets slipped from his shoulders during sex, exposing them both to the cold air of the bedroom, dark hair splashed across light sheets under him.

She was always at his back, even without checking, and he was fearless with her beside him.

She was all poise and cat-like confidence, and he tumbled gladly into loving her.

She was suddenly a part of his life like she'd been there all along, curled up in front of the fire with Jack and a book and reading to him in a way that suggested she'd been waiting for this moment and was satisfied with its timely arrival.

He stood in the doorway to listen and waited for the whip to fall. Aaron Hotchner was many things, but lucky in his loves was not one of them.

But if he could be, just once, he hoped it would be now.

 _Nobody, of the hundreds of people that had visited the Fair, knew that a grey spider had played the most important part of all,_ she read slowly, and she seemed unaware that the child in her arms was long asleep. _No one was with her as she died._

They carried Jack to bed together and then he found comfort from the chill of her words in her body and her mind.

"I love you," he said for the first time this night, as he moved within her while snow flurried against the windows outside. He knew snow against the windowpane would always remind him now of this moment. It had taken him a bit longer than her to stop being scared of this, but he'd gotten there eventually.

He found that he didn't really want the season to end.

 **.**

* * *

 **.**

Spring was announced by the arrival of flowers.

Emily stepped into her apartment at the end of this winter, and found those flowers.

More precisely, one flower. A purple lilac.

She'd asked Reid about them once, and while she had done so the remembered scent of them was thick in her memory.

"Purple lilac?" he'd asked. "Oh, they have tons of meanings. They're generally the first flower to bloom when the temperature rises, symbolizing spring. But mostly they're used as a reminder of a first love."

"Oh?" she'd asked, looking out the window to the frozen world. In the dead of winter, it sometimes seemed like spring would never come. "Interesting."

Reid kept on because that's what Reid did. He just kept talking until his words stopped her heart. "Actually, they're also used a symbol of confidence. Confidence from the giver of the receiver's returned affections. Kinda creepy actually, huh?"

Emily didn't know how to answer that.

 **.**

* * *

 **.**

When spring finally came, so did the lilac. When spring finally came, Lauren Reynolds died, and Emily Prentiss with her.

When spring finally came, it ended.


	2. Spring

**Chapter Two: Spring**

 **.**

 **.**

No one was with her as she died.

It wasn't a clean death either. It was a thousand deaths, layered over and over each other like the world's worst papercut. Starting off small, almost irrelevant, until the pain was all she knew and she was gasping with it.

The first was the lilac. Cut number one. She spent the night with her gun levelled at the door and she didn't tell Aaron.

The second was Tsia.

That one hurt and kept fucking hurting. She doubted it would ever stop, which was good, because she deserved it.

The third was Aaron. It was Aaron and her realizing she loved him too much to put him in danger. He was capable, entirely capable, of looking after himself, but then there was Jack to think of and the scars of Haley, and the thought that maybe he couldn't survive losing one more person.

She went after Doyle alone. To protect him and Jack and her team and the memory of the life she'd made for herself that was good and loved and entirely her own.

And even that didn't stop her dying.

 **.**

* * *

 **.**

No one was with her as she died.

No one was there in the warehouse when Doyle hurt her. Hotch saw the scars, saw the wound, saw the _brand,_ and he'd thought he could never hate like he'd hated Foyet, but he'd been wrong. No one was there in the warehouse as she fell, as she bled, as she slipped away.

Morgan had gotten there first but even he'd been too late. Hotch wasn't an idiot. He'd gotten there second and seen the blood and seen her face, heard Morgan begging, _pleading_ , and he'd known she hadn't heard a word.

She lay there dying and he was too late to hold her and tell her she'd be okay.

She coded in the ambulance and he wasn't there.

She'd barely made it off the table and he was too busy killing her to be by her side.

And then, when it was over and JJ split their team down the middle with a ruthlessness that took his breath away, he sent her away. Still alone.

She was alone and he was broken.

 **.**

* * *

 **.**

When she woke up, properly woke up, JJ told her what they wanted to do. What they had done. The lengths they'd go to keep her safe.

And she'd never doubted for an instant that they loved her, but in this second she realized just how much. This was their careers, their friendships, their family, and they put them all on the line to keep her alive.

JJ left them alone and Emily couldn't look at him because his face was too much like the end.

"There might be another way," she said around the pain that the painkillers barely kept at bay, and Aaron leaned over her and brushed the rough tips of his fingers over the thin flannel covering Doyle's brand. She flinched away, not wanting him to touch it or see it or even _know_ that Doyle had marked her, laid some kind of claim to her body that he had no damn right to possess. "Anything but this."

"Anything," he repeated blankly, and his eyes were shadowed, reminding her that he'd watched her bleed. "So long as you're alive, he's going to hunt you. I… I can't keep you safe. Not here."

 _I failed Haley already_ , said the line to his mouth and the fear in his eyes. The way his fingers dug into her palm when he tried to hold her hand only added to that. _I failed her, I'll fail you. Again and again and again and again._

And she realized once more he couldn't do this. He couldn't lose her, couldn't even face the _idea_ of losing her. He was strong only in the places he hadn't been broken before.

And she loved him, so she went.

"Okay," she said quietly, and so JJ told her family she was dead.

She wasn't really lying.

 **.**

* * *

 **.**

He carried her coffin in the weak springtime sun and it weighed him down with his lies and Morgan's anger and Reid's grief and Penelope's confusion.

" _Why did she go alone?"_ Morgan raged, and he pushed all the blame squarely onto the shoulders of the woman who'd died.

" _I didn't get to say goodbye,"_ said Reid, and withdrew into himself to stop from being hurt again.

" _But… we were supposed to bring her home,"_ whispered Penelope, and Hotch almost screamed with the unfairness of it all.

And there was Jack.

Jack was all three. He was grief that she was gone and anger that this had happened and overall… overall he was confused that someone could be there one minute and then gone the next.

He was screaming when Hotch told him, flatly refusing to consider it was possible.

He was crying himself to sleep every night for a week, the kind of crying that left him red and hazy and gasping for air.

He was a quiet whimper in the middle of the night that woke Aaron up in his too-empty bed. He was standing there with his wide eyes that hurt to look at, in the pyjamas she'd brought him, holding a candle that was almost worn to a stub.

"Do you think Mom will help us talk to Emily?" Jack said, holding the candle out hopefully, and Hotch could have cried in that moment because this was still grieving.

But he didn't.

 **.**

* * *

 **.**

She was mostly alone in the after. Hotch tried to come but he worked with profilers and was lying to his son, and she saw it dragging at him as he paced her hospital bed. He still came and pressed his lips to her hair and helped her remember how to walk without flinching and finally, finally, came to see her the day she left.

"We have to do this," she reminded him, because he was standing in her doorway like he could stop this from happening, his hands held awkwardly at his side. "It's too late now not too." _I'm already dead, Aaron, you just haven't buried the idea of me yet._

He just nodded jerkily and stepped aside so they could wheel the chair in for another indignity.

He didn't push the chair, but his fingers threaded tightly through hers and he didn't leave her side until the car came to take her away.

She was still dying from the thousand cuts, they hadn't stopped. That day was full of them. Leaving the room she'd spent over a month hiding away in. Packing her bag. Aaron letting go of her hand for what felt like a final time. Aaron grabbing her arm and pulling her away from the car she'd been about to ease herself into, dragging her back into his arms and clinging to her in a way that suggested for just this moment, he'd forgotten she was fragile.

She liked that he'd forgotten just fine, despite the stabbing pain in her gut and the lingering giddiness the drugs left her with.

Then he let her go, with a loud exhale that would have been a gasp on anyone less composed, and that was another death too.

"I love you," he said with his voice and his eyes and his heart, thrumming against her palm. His eyes were red and his mouth firm.

"I love you too," she replied, and closed her eyes for this. "I'm sorry."

The driver honked, the moment broken.

"Good luck," Aaron said, hiding behind the mask of Hotch, and stepped back from the curb to watch her drive away with his face impassive.

She pressed her face against the glass, her face hot and dry and aching. "Goodbye," she mumbled against the window, voice drowned out by the radio and the hum of traffic.

 **.**

* * *

 **.**

They hung a picture of her on the wall openly, and behind closed doors he knew they talked about him.

He didn't care. If that's how they chose to remember her, by remembering that she'd been loved, he could survive that.

Most of it anyway.

The world was a lot quieter now. Spring had brought growth and rebirth, but also the opposite, and instead of the gloom of winter clearing from the room it was settling heavier than ever. Reid was shattered in a way that even Hankel had failed to achieve, finally confirming Hotch's quiet belief that Reid could survive anything but the pain of those he loved. JJ was fine, almost too fine, but there was a desperation hidden in the way she'd stay overly long when going over cases with him, the only two in their lives now who knew that Emily Prentiss still breathed. Tied together by a mutual need to keep her that way.

Rossi suspected, but of course he did, because he'd built his career around seeing through lies and he'd built his personal life around seeing through Hotch's. He was, as always, good at his job.

But he didn't ask and for that, Hotch was thankful.

Morgan's anger never faded.

Garcia's confusion did but it was replaced with a weary resignation, and he saw the way she'd begin to tremble as soon as a new case hit their desks. She no longer believed in the surety of their return.

There was no blaming her for that, because none of them believed in it either.

And he counted the uncountable days since she'd died, and the countless ones until she returned.

 **.**

* * *

 **.**

JJ brought her a new name, a new life.

Well actually, she brought her three. JJ was all about choices, or maybe more likely, she was all about trying to make up for feeling like she'd trapped Emily into this one.

She brought her Emily Holden and said with a smile that she could keep her name if she wanted to this way. Emily wanted, wanted more than anything, but her name brought with it the memory of how it sounded when Aaron whispered it, and that hurt too much to relive over and over again.

She brought Marceline Scott and that was tempting.

She also brought Olivia Landry and that was a quiet name, a mousey name, and Emily had never been mousey before so it felt appropriate to begin with her name.

Their fingers brushed and their eyes lingered when JJ handed the file to her, and neither wanted to let go/look away first. Emily wanted to ask how everyone was, despite not really wanting to hear the answer, and she could tell that there were things JJ was struggling to leave unsaid.

"How is he?" Emily asked finally as they stood at their goodbye and tried to stall the moment.

"Grieving," JJ said quietly, and despite her not being dead, Emily understood exactly what that felt like. "He misses you."

"I miss him too," Emily admitted, and they went their separate ways.

It was the final death, really, because as soon as JJ's hand left the file, Emily fell away and left Olivia in her place.

It was the final death but that didn't stop it from hurting the most.

 **.**

* * *

 **.**

Garcia showed up on doorstep one painfully quiet Saturday morning, devoid of so many things he'd come to count on his Saturdays for, and she had a box under one arm and Sergio under the other.

"She'd have wanted you to have him," she said, her eyes brimming, and Hotch could think of a million reasons why this was a terrible idea, but only one as to why it wasn't.

And that one was Jack and the excitement on his face when he saw the cat, and that cinched it. He was actually smiling, and Hotch had missed that sorely. Their family, so recently made smaller, grew again by one.

The box sat unopened next to his couch until three weeks later when he sat down heavily with a glass of scotch and a casefile, and his eyes fell on it. He opened it, finding it filled with familiar books, papers, a drawing signed with a wobbly _Jack_.

One of the books drew his eye and fell open easily in his hand, his eyes finding the passage as though drawn to it. Held between his knees, the glass dripped slowly with cooling condensation, and still he stared at the words and struggled to understand why and how this hurt.

 _And Lot's wife, of course, was told not to look back where all those people and their homes had been. But she did look back, and I love her for that, because it was so human._

"I don't look back," Emily had told him bluntly one day, mouth half-cocked into a smile. Hotch had thought at the time that they were terribly alike.

He stared at that passage, Sergio jumped up onto his lap with a loud _mrrow_ and overset the scotch, and he finally understood.

They were nothing alike because she might not look back, and he could do nothing but. He was, in this moment, entirely human and entirely weak because of it.

And he knew what he would do next.

 **.**

* * *

 **.**

She got an apartment. She got a job.

It was lonely.

Despite the springtime, despite the flowers and the warming air, everything felt frozen. Like she'd stepped out of her life for just a moment, and hadn't quite stepped back into it yet.

She quit her job because it was next to a florist, and all she could smell was lilacs.

She almost took a man to her bed but finally didn't because he was all hands and not Aaron, and his hair was fair too light for her liking anyway. He'd slipped a hand up her top and paused when his fingertips traced her scar, and abruptly she'd remembered Doyle's brand.

One more thing he'd taken from her, but not one she thought she'd miss very much. She had no desire to welcome anyone back to her bed.

As it turned out, she was wrong about that last bit.

 **.**

* * *

 **.**

Another case.

The sheriff was a woman who looked at him and challenged him with her smile, daring him to underestimate her.

The victim had a black cat just like Sergio.

Reid mentioned her twice and stammered both times over her name.

It was too much.

"JJ," he said softly, right before they walked out of the door to begin another, hopeful, weekend. "If I was to catch a plane this weekend, where would I catch it?"

JJ stopped, her hand resting on her bag, and he could see he weighing their options here. He wondered which she'd chose; the option a colleague would choose, or the one a friend would.

In the end, she picked exactly what he thought she would, and she told him where to go.

"I'm doing fine," she told her reflection firmly one morning, before swinging open the bathroom cabinet to reach for the rows of neat pills that helped hold her body together.

"I'm doing fine," she repeated to a bowl of cereal, watching the soggy lumps clump together and sink sadly in the white-cream milk.

"I'm doing…" she mumbled, swinging the door open to what she thought would be the mailman, and finding Aaron on her doorstep. "Shit!"

"Hi, Emily," he said, and smiled awkwardly. They stared at each other.

"Olivia," she corrected him finally, and he nodded grimly.

"Olivia," he parroted. He looked tired. There were lines on his face she didn't recognise. "Hi, Olivia."

They stared at each other for half a second more, and then he was inside and holding her and crushing his mouth to hers, and he tasted just like she remembered.

He kissed just the same, except there was a desperate hunger to it now, and she almost keened into that mouth because now she had it she didn't know how to let go again.

"I miss you so fucking much," he gasped against her neck, undoing her shirt with a brush of his fingers, and she arched into that touch, craving it. "So. Fucking. Much. I can't _think_. You're everywhere."

She understood that. She saw him turning the corner ahead sometimes, or in her dreams, or even for a split second upon waking. Everywhere and impossible to escape from, mixed in with her longing for Morgan and Reid and Garcia and _JJ_.

"I'm here," she said instead of all that, and returned the favour by leading him to the bedroom.

They had to be careful because she was still tender and he was scared of shattering her, but despite that it was still over far too soon and impossible to hang onto.

He stayed for two days and they left the bedroom rarely and the apartment even less.

On the last day, she woke to him sitting with his head in his hands, naked still except for the sheet tangled around his legs. "I don't know how to walk away," he admitted to her, and she could have said _well don't._

But that would be selfish.

"You have to," she said instead, and rolled over so her back was to him and he couldn't see the tears.

Despite her care, he knew anyway, and held her until they were over

 **.**

* * *

 **.**

"Summer soon," she said in their final hour, glancing out the window at the red-yellow evening. "Jesus. Where did the spring go?"

There was an answer to that, but it was one neither of them would admit to.

"I can come back," he said, tying his tie and smoothing his shirt under his palm to hide the indiscretions of the past few days. "A few months. Maybe less. We can… this can work."

For a moment, she looked tempted.

Then the look vanished and in its place was a stubborn despondency he knew well, and loved better. "No," she said, standing and curving her arms around his side to rest her hands on the base of his spine, letting herself be small and delicate in his arms for just a second. It wasn't often Emily let herself be fragile—although she wasn't Emily now and maybe Olivia was a different person entirely—so he treasured the moment and took the chance to memorise her body against his. "You know we can't, Aaron. You know what this is."

He knew.

It was the end of them.

He gave her one last gift, except really it was a cruelty.

"You won't be here if I come back, will you?" he asked her, and she didn't have to answer because he knew she'd be packing before his plane left the ground. "I understand. Goodbye, Emily."

He called her Emily and thought that maybe it would be the last time for a long time someone did.

And he left.

 **.**

* * *

 **.**

No one was with her as she died for what was absolutely the final time.

She closed the door on the empty apartment, gave all the meagre possessions she owned to charity, and started again, one more time.

And it worked for a while. She found somewhere new, where Emily had never been and Olivia could finally _live_. She didn't think of JJ when she saw a mother swinging her son in her arms, and she didn't think of Reid when she saw a man doing card tricks on the street corner to a delighted gaggle of schoolgirls.

She didn't think of Garcia when a co-worker brought in cupcakes and shared them with a laugh.

She didn't think of Morgan when someone stepped aside on the train to let her on, and said with a wink and a grin, ' _Qu'est-ce que vous avez de beaux yeux.'_

She didn't think of Aaron when the same man asked her to dinner once, and then again, and then asked her home after.

She thought of Aaron briefly when she declined the man's offer and went home alone.

And she stayed like that. Alone.

But not for long, because when summer came so did Marceline.


	3. Summer

**Chapter Three: Summer**

 **.**

 **.**

Two months after Emily Prentiss died for the last time, she woke up with the distinct feeling that something had gone really, really wrong. Somehow.

The feeling lasted all day. It lingered as she sat at her desk and tried to pay attention to what the marketing clerk was saying to her. It built at lunch as she picked over a tuna salad that she'd accidentally ordered in English.

And it finally cemented ten minutes later as she hurled that tuna salad into the bleached white toilet bowl of the nearby bathroom.

 _Stomach flu,_ she thought instantly, and counted back.

 _Stomach flu,_ she repeated when she brought the test.

And finally, as she stared at the last thing in the world she needed right now.

 _Fuck._

 **.**

* * *

 **.**

Three months after the last time he called her Emily, they took JJ from them. Hotch watched his team and saw how the loss rocked them, throwing them all off kilter. But they held firm, barely.

They'd had harder weights to bear than this.

Summer rolled in. It bleached the buildings and stole the air from their lungs when they stepped out of the jet. Winter seemed impossibly far away.

Then he got the call.

Rossi walked into his office with the never-faltering smile on his lips, ready to continue buoying them up no matter how hard things got. No matter how empty the jet got, or how many souls they lost. He found Hotch with his hands folded in his lap, staring at his desk like he was trying to memorise the swirl of the grain.

His step faltered. He paused in the doorway.

The smile vanished.

"Aaron?"

"They're transferring me." What was the point in softening the blow?

Silence broken only by the sound of his oldest friend swallowing hard. "Where?"

"Pakistan."

 **.**

* * *

 **.**

Three months.

She made up her mind. Then she changed it. Time ticked on. She put it off.

Time ticked over. It made her decision for her. Emily Prentiss had never been one to allow herself to be buffeted about by life, but apparently Olivia Landry was perfectly content to wallow in inaction until all options were exhausted.

It was tiring, she was finding, learning who she was all over again.

Three months. Twelve weeks. Out of time.

She tore up the clinic's pamphlet, the numbers they gave her, and she buried them in the trash under an empty yoghurt container and a week's worth of junk mail.

Then she booked a plane ticket, leaving the date of departure open.

Olivia Landry was indecisive.

 **.**

* * *

 **.**

Winter wasn't just a memory in this new life. It was a dream.

It was a faded image from something that had happened to someone else, a long time ago, worn away by the baking sun and dust storms that brought gusts of sand-ridden wind that cut his skin and turned the sky orange-red for as far as he could see.

Jack became a fuzzy face on a battered laptop, crying because they couldn't touch. Jessica never cried, but her eyes were red and she hesitated every time it came to disconnecting their calls.

Emily became a ghost and joined Haley in his mind, locked away in a dark corner to whisper at him during sleepless nights when the heat pressed down on him and made it impossible to rest.

His team… broke. The death of Emily Prentiss hurt them, the loss of JJ shook them, but him being gone was the final point of pressure. The last pressure needed to shatter them. Reid was gone. Temporary leave. He doubted it was temporary. JJ, gone; Seaver, gone. Garcia… less. Morgan was there in spirit, but he knew the man was driven by obsession now.

It was understandable. Hotch wanted nothing more than to find Doyle and take back what the man owed them, to bring her home, but it seemed impossible.

Or maybe it was just the summer that made everything seem so bleak and colourless, except for the red. Everything tinted red.

And time passed.

 **.**

* * *

 **.**

D.C looked just the same.

It had taken her six months to make it here. It felt… impossible. Making that final choice. She had to push Olivia aside and reach for the Emily she used to be just to step onto the plane. But she had.

And she was home.

Home?

It didn't feel like it. She hired a car and drove almost aimlessly, avoiding the places she knew at first. Around every brightly lit shopfront, their doors thrown open to usher in the unseasonably warm fall air, she saw Doyle lurking. He was an unspoken threat on every street, in every passing vehicle, and she was almost glad for the gun on the holster around her thigh.

It had been her first acquisition upon stepping off the plane, and she wasn't sorry for it.

Eventually the streets turned familiar. They didn't hurt, not yet, but they were dangerous. More dangerous than the phantom Doyle.

The coffee shop she would visit with Reid after visiting the nearby theatre hall. The booth he favoured because he swore its placement meant it would receive the best service, as well as the most pleasing ratio of cool air from the door and heating from the vents overhead. She watched the door for a while, parked across the street, and didn't go in. Looking for a tall man in a purple scarf, and wondering what she'd do if she saw him.

The jogging track she visited with Morgan, meandering down into the park and out of sight. Still busy at this time of the night as people enjoyed the respite before winter.

JJ's favourite restaurant. They'd taken her there to celebrate Henry being an idea, and again when Henry was born, and so many times in between just because. They'd finally taught Reid how to handle chopsticks there.

But she still couldn't do it. She still couldn't drive that final distance.

In the end, she called instead. JJ answered with a smile, and that smile faded when she realized who it was and from where she was calling.

Emily didn't cry but it was close and JJ could hear that.

And she found out he was gone.

 **.**

* * *

 **.**

JJ looked… exactly the same.

It was impossibly painful. She should look different. Everything was so changed now, _Emily_ was so changed, how could she possibly be the same person?

Emily was also finding that it was impossible to be Olivia when around her everyone spoke English instead of French, and JJ walked towards her with her hair tied back and her face clouded with worry.

And that was fine. Because Emily was stronger than Olivia had ever needed to be, and she felt her shoulders straighten and the hint of a smile play at her mouth. A real smile. Genuine happiness, something else Olivia knew little about. Because her friend was here, almost within reach, and Emily had been alone for so long.

"Em," JJ said, reaching the table and looping the strap of her handbag over the chair. "Why are you here? This is dangerous. Anyone could see… Doyle…"

Emily stood. JJ's eyes widened.

"JJ, meet complication. Complication, meet JJ."

"Well," JJ said finally, sitting down with a thump. "Fuck."

 **.**

* * *

 **.**

In the end, when JJ asked if she knew who the father was she lied.

Because being here, back in D.C, like nothing had changed… it only drove home how much it had. It was fall but the nights were still stifling, and Aaron had no place in her endless isolated summer.

If she told JJ, JJ would tell her to tell Aaron. And if Emily didn't, JJ would, because she wasn't the kind of person who could hide something like that and Emily couldn't hold that against her.

But if Aaron knew, she knew what he'd do. He'd ruin himself for her.

 _Pakistan,_ JJ had said sadly, watching sugar sink slowly through the foam on the top of her cappuccino. _Everything is a mess._

If he knew, he'd follow her. She couldn't come back, not with Doyle out there and so much more to lose, so he'd come to her. He'd bring Jack. His career, over. They'd disappear into obscurity, together.

The idea of him sacrificing so much for her made her want to vomit. She'd never, not once in her fucking life, asked anyone to give her that much power over them, and she couldn't do it now. And looking at the ruin of what she'd left of her family when she'd died, the things JJ told her and the things that she didn't, she couldn't do it to them again.

She couldn't take Aaron and Jack away too.

"Do you know the father?" JJ asked quietly, and Emily lied. Olivia would have told the truth. Olivia was scared of her own loneliness. It was why she'd let one month turn into two, into three, until all options were exhausted.

"No."

Emily was used to being alone.

 **.**

* * *

 **.**

Ten months after Emily.

It was a phone call that brought him home. Morgan. Angry, still. _"We found Doyle."_

And they had. The team regathered. JJ was back, and when he asked her if it was permanent, she made a sly comment about painting her office to ensure it would be. She watched him, constantly, and there was something unsaid in the darkness of her eyes that chilled him.

Reid came back. He was quieter, skinnier, and every morning he'd slink in seconds from being late with the stink of gunpowder still lingering on his sleeves.

Outside, it was winter. It was winter, and this whole thing… her death, her life, her killer… it was all ending.

He called Emily. JJ was reluctant, hesitant, and she lingered when she gave him the number. He wondered why. She answered on the fifth ring, and she sounded exhausted.

She must be exhausted, since she'd apparently failed to notice the area code on the call.

 _"_ _Allô. Qui est à l'appareil?"_

And he couldn't, for a long broken moment, say a word. He just started at the darkening winter afternoon outside his office window, and tried to remember how to talk to her.

This more than anything—more than seeing Reid slouched in his chair with his hands folded around a coffee or finding Rossi perched on his desk and extolling the virtues of a new wine—was familiar and painful and _home_. It was on the same level as walking into his house and having Jack throw himself into his arms, giggling as Hotch's beard scratched against his cheek. It was on the same level as Jessica hugging him close.

It was family and it was so fucking close he could taste it.

"Emily. It's Aaron. We've found Doyle."

A sharp exhale, shocked and excited. That was expected. He waited for what he knew would come next, his heart tightening as though waiting to beat again knowing she was returning. He waited for the inevitable, _"I'm on my way."_ Or, _"Fucking finally. Took your damn time."_ Or even, _"I know. Already got my gun on him, Hotch. Was wondering when you'd catch up."_

None of those came.

Instead a slow sigh, and when she spoke again her voice was ever so unfamiliar, accented almost, and her tone was soft. "Take him down for me, Aaron. You take that bastard down."

And when he promised her he would and hung up feeling lost, he realized.

She wasn't coming home.

 **.**

* * *

 **.**

The unblocked number with the DC area code sat in her phone and taunted her daily, even as the days fed from one to another and the device stood silent.

She was haunted. Haunted by Doyle, by Aaron, by what could have happened. By Declan.

But she couldn't go back. She couldn't invite that danger into her bed, not anymore. What if Doyle got away from her team?

It would be Foyet all over again, because she knew he'd come after her, and she had so much more to lose now.

Instead, she focused on Olivia.

And she focused on Marceline.

Marceline was born in the winter that Emily's team hunted Doyle, and instead of helping them, she stayed Olivia and she stayed away. The winter closed around them, and she gave Marceline what Emily Prentiss couldn't give her. One thing Olivia was better at.

A normal life.

She sat with her daughter against her breast and the weather against the window, and she pretended desperately that this was everything she wanted.

 **.**

* * *

 **.**

 _"_ _Once upon a time there was a little girl born to a lost mother. And the little girl grew up, bigger than the mother would ever have imagined she would, and she said to her mother that she would be a spy and learn all the secrets of the world. Her mother knew that this would only ever cause her trouble, because secrets were how she was lost in the beginning. But the girl was determined that a spy she would be, and that she would find the biggest secret of all."_

 **.**

* * *

 **.**

They took Declan.

Hotch hovered over the phone because he knew she'd want to know. He pulled up the contact he'd (foolishly, maybe) saved, and considered that he had trouble letting go.

But she did too, and she'd loved this child before she'd loved him, or Jack.

JJ was at his arm and he hadn't seen her walk towards him, so preoccupied he was with his course of action. She looked at the number, breathed slowly and said, "She won't come."

He could profile her. He could. He started to, because there was a level of _because_ hidden in those simple three words that he knew she was fighting to withhold.

Instead, he deleted the contact. He got his team ready, and they went after Doyle. After Declan.

He let her go.

And they failed.

They lost Declan and with his child dead, they lost Doyle. The man escaped. They almost stopped him, almost re-caught him, but there was a hail of gunfire and Reid cried out. Hotch pulled them back, fear almost blinding him, and found Reid pressing his palms against an angry hole in Morgan's arm.

Hotch knew Doyle would be back, because if it was Jack… he'd do the same.

 **.**

* * *

 **.**

The message on the online scrabble game blinked accusingly at her.

 ** _Blackbird: Did you find your dog? Heard animal control picked him up._**

 ** _Cheeto-breath: He got away._**

 ** _Cheeto-breath: I'm sorry._**

 ** _Cheeto-breath: Olivia?_**

 **Blackbird is offline.**

 **.**

* * *

 **.**

 _"_ _And when the girl was finished growing, she said goodbye to her mother because she didn't need her anymore and went off to find her dream. It was hard. The world was cold and dangerous and she often wished she could just go home. She founds secrets, like she said she would, and they weren't all easy to know. She found herself feeling lonely. She thought maybe she'd become lost, just like her mother."_

 **.**

* * *

 **.**

Winter passed and spring flew by and a year since she'd died.

Hotch took Jack to her grave and they left flowers and a wonky drawing.

Time kept moving inexorably onwards, and they moved on.

Summer again soon.

 **.**

* * *

 **.**

They moved half a dozen times in the first year of Marceline's life because Doyle hung over them like a warning.

It was paranoia, plain and simple, but the first time Marceline looked at her—properly _looked_ at her and smiled—Emily knew she couldn't take the easy route. Olivia might be able to give her daughter a normal life, but Emily could give her a safe one.

So they went where Emily had always felt safest, and Marceline grew in the cabin where Emily had once sat at her grand-pere's knee. On this one day, late summer with the forest complaining about the heat around them, Emily sat on the rocky drive of her home and held Marcie's tiny hands in her own, helping her step awkwardly across the uneven ground.

Her hair was dark, darker than Emily's. Her eyes were a shade to solemn to be purely Emily's, her mouth ever so slightly too quick to smile to be solely her father's. She was a mix, and the guilt of that was breathtaking.

The sun slipped down the mountain and turned the tops of the pines around them green-gold, and Emily sat in the fading afternoon and thought of everything this had cost them.

A tired grumble and he daughter flopped, glaring when Emily resisted letting her sit on the gravel and instead pulling her into her lap. "Mama, non!" she scolded, wiggling, before falling still and pressing her face to Emily's chest and leaving a damp patch across her shirt.

Peaceful, perhaps, but lonely.

That was the day Emily changed the story.

 **.**

* * *

 **.**

 _"_ _And the girl became a spy, one of the best, but she wasn't alone. She had friends. She didn't know it at the time, because it was her mother's greatest secret and the girl wasn't quite that good at spying just yet, but they were her mother's friends and they loved her dearly. There was the oldest and he was the most cunning, but the quickest to make her smile. The kindest, and the girl loved her blue eyes and her gentle smile, but most of all she loved how she reminded the girl of her mother."_

 **.**

* * *

 **.**

JJ fell asleep on the jet one day with her laptop open on the desk in front of her, and Hotch hadn't meant to look but the blinking cursor had caught his eye. She'd been midway through a game of scrabble and he smiled and absent-mindedly made plans to find his board at home and teach Jack how to play.

 ** _Cheeto-breath: How's your garden growing?_**

 ** _Blackbird: Unstoppably. You never warned me how damn *fast* it happens._**

He looked away feeling guilty for intruding, but JJ had fallen asleep contemplating sending a message she'd never hit the enter key on, and it was that that had drawn his gaze.

 ** _: I wish I could meet her_** / _enter to submit_

He stayed late that night and his hand kept straying to the file that had a permanent home on his desk these days, the one marked _Ian Doyle._

That file became a permanent part of his office, but it never gathered dust. He never let it rest.

He never had been very good at letting go.

 **.**

* * *

 **.**

 _"_ _The girl found herself in danger sometimes, but one of her mother's friends was the smartest man alive, and he knew magic. He'd whisk her away from trouble in a heartbeat and sometimes the girl was angry because she wanted to deal with her problems herself, but she could never stay angry with him for long. And there was the brave friend, who was wonderfully kind but horribly stubborn—they fought a lot and he never admitted when he was wrong—and the girl was never lonely. Many things but never lost, and never lonely."_

 **.**

* * *

 **.**

 _"_ _Bonjour, Mademoiselles,"_ called a voice one morning, and Emily stepped out to find Nathan leaning into the back of his squad car and tugging a wooden crate towards him.

Marceline tugged at her jeans, clinging close and glaring suspiciously out from behind her knees as Emily hovered by the door and tried not to frown. Emily soothed her, turning her expression into a smile. _"Look, Marceline. It's the gendarme. Say hello?"_

"No," Marceline mumbled, chubby hands pinching Emily's calf as she clung. She corrected herself at the sound of Nathan's French, switching from English without missing a beat. _"Non, maman."_ As it sometimes did, it struck Emily just how damn _big_ the girl was getting. Almost two.

Almost two…

His hat tumbled to the ground as he stood, knocking it on the roof of the car. His laugh was real, delighted, and Marcie giggled nervously along. _"Maman sent me with your groceries for the week, since you didn't make it down yesterday. She wanted me to check in on you. Est-ce que ça va, Olivia?"_

 _"_ _Je vais bien, merci Nathan,"_ she replied quietly, biting back her unease at him being at her home. _"It's unnecessary, really. Marcie wasn't feeling well; we were going to come down today."_

He smiled warmly at her, using his eyes as well as his mouth, and she knew that smile. The last time she'd seen that smile was on Aaron, a lifetime ago, and it promised so much more. She didn't return it. _"Coucou, Marcie! Je te souhaite un bon rétablissement."_ Cap back in his hands, he dropped it onto her daughter's head and smiled as it slipped over her eyes. _"Ah, what a pretty little policier!"_

Marcie smiled shyly but didn't answer, and Emily thanked him for his trouble and kept her face blank. He didn't push, he wasn't the type, but his eyes lingered when he walked back to his truck. Warm fingers caught hers as she leaned forward to wish him farewell, his eyes were dark and familiar and, most dangerously, concerned.

 _"_ _What are you afraid of, Olivia?"_ he asked finally. Scooping her daughter up into her arms, Emily hid her shock by pressing her mouth against her daughter's dark silky-straight hair in a rough kiss, before holding her out carefully so she could pass the now battered hat to the man with another laugh. _"I can help you."_

 _"_ _We don't need help,"_ she said firmly, and it wasn't really a lie. Emily was nothing if not capable, especially as the seasons flew by and she continued shedding Olivia like a duck sheds water. Sometimes, these days, she thought her team might even recognise her.

Nathan nodded, almost sad. _"Bon après midi."_

They watch him drive away together.

 **.**

* * *

 **.**

Hotch hadn't gotten as far as he had by not trusting his team, so when he found JJ on his front door step one morning, dressed for jogging with sweat staining her light shirt and pasting strands of blonde hair to her forehead, his gut pinched nervously.

He didn't show this fear.

"JJ," he greeted her calmly, letting her in and watching her eyes rove nervously around the living room. Jack called out a _hello_ from the other room, banging about and trying to find his soccer gear that he'd somehow scattered from one end of the house to the other. The press of summer, their fifth summer since _her_ , in the air made his mouth dry, his words hard to form. "How can I help you?"

"I just got a call," she said finally, biting at her lip, and when she turned to him her gaze was sharp. "Ever since Doyle escaped, I've had… friends… keeping an eye on things."

 _Things._ Things being Emily, Hotch knew instantly. His gut stopped pinching and instead twisted almost painfully, already mentally reaching for his keys, his phone, his weapon.

"It's been almost five years," he said. His voice snapped and JJ flinched. She was… _terrified. Of what?_ "Why now? What's happened now?"

"There were some interesting searches flagged," she answered finally. She brushed the back of her hand against her head, smiled weakly at Jack as he flew past and up the stairs, lowered her voice. "Someone is looking for her, Hotch."

"Did they find her?"

"We don't know. She's not answering her phone."

 **.**

* * *

 **.**

 _"_ _There was one more friend, and he was the girl's favourite. He was everything the others were but so much more. Brave, smart, loyal, warm. He was handsome and kind, and the girl loved him dearly despite how stern he could seem. He was the leader, and sometimes if the girl was sad, he would tell her about her mother. The girl suspected that he had once loved her mother, but never worked up the courage to ask."_

 _"_ _Why not ask?"_

 _"_ _Maybe she was afraid to know. See, the girl knew many secrets, but none about her mother. And as the years went by, she was starting to suspect that her mother had many. Because she was a spy, and a very good one, the girl worried that one day she would have to find out her mother's secrets in order to become the best."_

 _"_ _I don't have secrets, maman."_

 _"_ _That's good, ma fifille. Because I am a much, much better spy that you are just yet – perhaps save the secrets until you are a little older."_

 _"_ _How older?_ _Cinq?"_

 _"_ _Oh… at least six, don't you think? Four is far too little for secrets, and five not much better."_

 **.**

* * *

 **.**

Four was perhaps far too little for secrets, but not for change.

Nathan was leaning against his mother's storefront when she entered, winking when he saw her and crouching to greet Marcie. Marcie beamed, bouncing on her heels, launching into a long description in mixed French of the deer they'd seen the week before and that she'd been obsessed with since then.

Emily smiled, stepped around them and chatted with his mother about the weather, Marcie, mundane things. Everyday things.

 _"_ _Ah, Olivia,"_ Madam Moreau said suddenly, her hand pausing on the till. _"There was a man here asking for you yesterday. He didn't leave his name. Are you expecting a friend?"_

Emily froze and she felt Nathan's gaze burning her. When she turned to look at him, feeling almost irreversibly off-kilter, his hand was settled on Marcie's slim shoulder and his expression burned. In that moment she regretted every inch she'd given him, letting him into her life and then her home and, finally, her bed, because she'd chosen this life to protect Aaron and now it was going to crumble around them and it would bring this other man down with it.

 _"_ _Olivia?"_ he asked.

She reached, took Marcie's hand, tugged her towards her. There was a startled noise of surprise, of protest, from her daughter, but it stopped when Marcie felt her shaking. _"I have to go,"_ Emily stammered, and now both eyes were on her and this wasn't how Emily would act, not at all. _"Je suis désolée."_

She ignored Nathan calling after her and they ran.

Again.

 **.**

* * *

 **.**

JJ's words haunted him as he tried not to fidget in the plane seat, staring out the window and counting every second that passed that was another second that Doyle could beat him there.

 _"_ _I've booked you the first flight available. She's staying at her grandfather's cabin, in the French Alps. She's been living there for four years now. Are you sure you should be going alone? I can talk to Will, or even Rossi… you could explain it to him."_

He had to do this alone. This was his repentance. JJ was already working to alert the French authorities that Doyle was a threat without mentioning Emily (or Olivia), and the team was working on finding out if Doyle had entered the country or not. There had been a suspicious sharpness to Dave's eyes when Hotch had told them to find out, and Hotch hadn't liked the way Reid was looking from one man to the other, eyes narrowed.

But that paled in comparison to JJ's last statement.

"Aaron… she's not alone."

 **.**

* * *

 **.**

 _"_ _Does the leader know he's her papa?"_

 _"_ _Not yet. But you know how the story ends, you know he finds out soon."_

 _"_ _But the loup comes first, ouais maman?"_

 _"_ _Yes. The wolf comes first."_


	4. Fall

**Chapter Four: Fall**

 **.**

 **.**

 **Blackbird is offline.**

 ** _Cheeto-breath: Are you there?_**

 ** _Cheeto-breath: We're coming for you, Emily. Hotch is coming. Please call us._**

 ** _Cheeto-breath: The team knows. Don't let him catch you now, not after everything._**

 ** _Cheeto-breath: Come home._**

 **Blackbird is offline.**

 **Cheeto-breath is offline.**

 **.**

* * *

 **.**

She took the corners of the tightly winding mountain road almost too quickly and felt the wheels complain under her as they hissed over the slick surface, slowing with a hiss at the startled _Maman_ from the backseat as Marcie flopped against her restraints.

"What's wrong, Maman?" her daughter asked, and there was a whine to her voice that suggested she was about to start crying soon if things didn't start making sense again quickly. Emily flicked her eyes up to the rear-view for a second, meeting the dark gaze with a wrench of her gut as her brain imagined another dark gaze so much the same.

"Nothing, love," she soothed, easing off the accelerator. "We're going to go on a trip together, a holiday. Won't that be fun?"

"Maybe." Cautious, as always. Her father's daughter.

 _Maybe it's time,_ Emily thought suddenly, because there was one man she trusted with her daughter's life—well, in all honestly, there were six people she trusted—but there was one she knew would keep her safe despite anything the world threw at them. And now, with the wolf at the door, it was no time to be alone. If Doyle had tracked her here, to Olivia's home, then the game was up and the chase was over.

She could be Emily again.

"Tell me a story?" she asked her daughter with a smile that was a touch too sharp, and Marcie's expression turned nervous in response. "Tell me about the spy while I drive, okay? And how she got away from the wolf, the _loup_."

"Okay."

 **.**

* * *

 **.**

The cabin was empty. Oddly, considering Emily's careful paranoia even _before_ Doyle, the front door was unlocked.

Hotch swallowed and eased the door open, stepping inside into a world that was just a shade short of familiar. Emily's books – not the ones she'd owned as Emily, but copies that she'd procured as Olivia. Furniture that was functional but pleasing to the eye. When he scanned the DVDs in the rack next to the TV, there were as many English titles as there were French.

Then there were the differences.

The child's drawing taped neatly to the fridge. The cartoons and animated features in the rack. The picture books on the shelves, tattered and well-read. A plush rabbit sitting with his head tilted wonkily on the couch, perched neatly in a pool of deep-ocean-blue minky blanket.

The scene was untouched, painfully domestic. He stepped forward and ran his thumb over the blanket, almost toppling the rabbit.

There were no pictures, not in this room.

He needed pictures, and it was a need that was sudden and fierce, because JJ had warned him there was a child but the warning was one thing. Being suddenly faced with the evidence of Emily's new life, her family, that was…

Thrilling.

Ever aware of Doyle looming over them, a constant danger, he found himself walking into a short hall, eyes scanning the three doors. Bathroom. Emily's room.

He stepped into the child's room and found it alive with colour. With life.

And he found a photo. Emily with her head turned away from the camera, the corner of a smile visible on the profile of her face. Wearing a sundress that looked so oddly normal on her it made his heart ache. The child in her arms, legs kicking, clearly fighting to be free and laughing at whoever held the camera.

JJ's voice still whirled in his head. _"She has a daughter."_

His pained caution. _"How old?"_

 _"_ _Four."_

Four.

He stared at his eyes in her daughter's face, and the world narrowed to this moment.

How could she hide this from him?

Gravel crunched outside and the moment broke. He felt at his hip for a gun that wasn't there as the vehicle drew up to the front of the cabin.

And he waited, unarmed and utterly determined.

 **.**

* * *

 **.**

 _"_ _And the loup bit the girl-spy. He was going to eat her, but before he could there was a Bang! And the girl looked up and her maman was there with her gun and she shot the… the um. Bête?"_

 _"_ _Beast."_

 _"_ _Ouais, beast! And the girl was happy, but not surprised, because in all her adventures she knew her maman still loved her. Like you for me?"_

 _"_ _Of course."_

 _"_ _What if the loup tries to bite me?"_

 _"_ _It wouldn't even get close."_

 **.**

* * *

 **.**

There was a car in the drive already. Emily slammed the gear into park and paused, waiting. The rental car gleamed in the fading fall light. A single leaf was stuck under the wiper, testament to it having not been long parked under the shade of the trees.

Doyle wouldn't park so blatantly, so mockingly, on her doorstep.

And their passports, their IDs, everything… was inside. Cussing silently, she switched the car off, threw the emergency brake on, and turned to her daughter.

"Marceline," she said firmly, unbuckling herself and pressing herself flat against the centre console to release her daughter's safety buckle and reach under her seat for the blanket folded neatly under there. "I need you to listen to me, okay? Through here – yes, like that. In, in. Can you stay flat and quiet, very quiet, for Maman, okay? Put this over your head. Hiding, just like a game."

Her daughter slid through the middle seat into the back of the range rover, peering back at her and taking the blanket with a hand that shook. " _Oui, Maman_ ," she said finally, sliding the blanket over her shoulders and curling into it so only her dark eyes were visible. "Just a game? _Cache-cache?"_

"Just a game," Emily reassured her, and waited until even Marcie's eyes were covered before unlocking the glove compartment and wrapping her fingers around the cool heft of the handgun in there. "You hide here, and I'll come back. I love you."

She said _I love you_ and she couldn't hide the way the words begged as they fell out of her mouth, almost like she was asking whoever was listening to ensure they weren't a lie. A quiet supplication to _dear whoever, let me come back to my daughter, don't take me from her, don't have Doyle be waiting in our home with the bullet with my name on it, please, please, please._

Dying had changed her. She was no longer so sure of her own immortality.

"Love you too." The quiet answer, but firmer. Marceline was always absolutely certain of her mother's love.

She locked the car door behind her and the gravel crunching under her boots, muffled slightly by the rain-wet leaves underfoot, sounded almost like an ending.

 **.**

* * *

 **.**

The door whispered open, the slight groan of a floorboard under a boot placed with such painful care announcing the gun that would be on him the moment he stepped out of the child's room.

He stepped out anyway because he'd heard the gait on the gravel outside, and he'd known it.

"Emily," he called before showing himself, his empty hands. "It's me."

The door was closed behind her and her expression was a stranger's, cold and fierce like the winter he associated with her, the gun hovering on him just long enough for sweat to bead on his neck and inch its way slickly down his spine. Mouth dry, throat too thick to form words, he waited for the two possibilities of this moment to resolve into one; she'd recognise him and lower the gun or she'd recognise a threat and her finger would slip.

He should have known. Death hadn't changed her so much.

Emily Prentiss had never been one to slip.

"Aaron." By the crack of her voice, his wasn't the only dry throat, and she lowered the gun and the blank mask she wore at the same time. He stared at her, so familiar and so different, still as beautiful and as untouchable as the first day she'd stepped into his office, but there was a softness around her mouth that was entirely new and completely thrilling. Her eyes were still hard though, cold with fear. "Holy fucking fuck, Aaron, _fuck_."

That was relief and she stumbled, never letting go of the gun, almost like she'd forgotten the years between them in the rush of _no longer alone_. Unconsciously, he raised one arm to catch her—she'd already caught herself by that point, of course, but he was always ready to try—to attempt to draw her into his arms.

Too late for that. She pulled back, her eyes skittering around the room and resting on the door he'd stepped out of. On the child's room.

On _their_ child's room, because he could count, damnit.

"You didn't tell me," he said, and they both heard the slow anger that he couldn't hide, the betrayal. Then, because she'd shut the door behind her and dead-bolted it automatically (she'd lock herself in, but she wouldn't lock people out), "Where is she?"

Emily stared at him blankly for a moment before murmuring something in French and trailing off into a sharp, _shit_ , and turning on her heel. She reached for the deadbolt and his heart lurched, sending him striding across the room to catch her hand before she tugged the door open without a care for what lay outside.

Where their skin touched, they burned, and he could feel her fingers trembling against his palm but she didn't pull away. Instead she froze like a rabbit trying to remain unseen, leaning both away and towards him all at once; an indecision that sat wrongly on her. She'd never been indecisive before, but somewhere in the last five years, she'd learned to be.

 _"_ _La voiture,"_ she said first, then shook herself and the Emily he knew returned. "In the car. I didn't know who you were and I needed our passports, our paperwork."

"To run." He didn't phrase it as a question.

And she smiled in return, cocky and steady once more. The indecision faded and she leaned away now, sure of her path. "To come home," she corrected him, and the deadbolt grated open with a _thunk_.

 **.**

* * *

 **.**

They moved together towards the car and he paced at her back – unarmed but so fucking real and steady that her fear was forgotten in the rush of _him_.

An engine throbbed, the sound coiling up the mountain road like smoke, and she turned her gun on the yawning opening between the trees where the driveway met road. The blue of the sky and the green-orange of the fading trees beyond that open began to haze, blurred by a slow drizzle of cold rain that crept slowly into the clearing. Hotch faltered, his own gaze turning to him, and Marcie hated strangers, her shyness crippling, but Emily was armed and Aaron wasn't and speed was important.

She tossed her keys and he caught them without breaking gaze on the road, already jogging towards the dark shape of the range rover. "In the back," she called, and then a second later, "Tell her you're the _capitaine_ , the leader. Just do it!"

They'd worked together long enough before all of this that he didn't question her, just vanished around the side of the car without looking back. She took a deep breath, turned her back on her (what? What is he now?) and her daughter and stood side on with the gun held steady and her back held firm.

Armed and utterly determined.

The car approached. Gravel crunched behind her, running feet. Heavier than his usual gait, and she knew if she turned her head she'd see Marcie in his arms and _god she wanted/needed/longed_ to see that, and had from the moment Marcie had opened her mouth the first time and protested the loneliness of this new world, but she kept her eyes on the road. The rain reached her and she didn't blink as it touched her face, threatened her vision, chilled her body, bringing with it a thick smell of damp that pervaded all of her senses.

The gravel faded, followed by the thump of boots on wood, one two, and the door opening. She counted to five, then turned and ran towards the house, her back exposed.

That flight was eight steps long but it felt like it took hours. Every muscle in her back tensed, coiled, waiting for the bullet to tear through her spine.

It didn't come. The car crested the ridge as she crossed the stoop with one last bound, past Hotch with his arm held out and fingers white-knuckled around the wood of the door, and past Marcie standing back from the door with the blanket pooled around her feet in a nest and her mouth open in a wide _O_.

The door banged, the deadbolt slammed home, and she shook then as the adrenaline crashed into her. Cool hands touched hers, took the gun, took her hand; she turned and his arms were there, open, still open, and she pressed herself into them and almost shattered.

 **.**

* * *

 **.**

She burst through the door and he closed it behind her, catching her as she huffed out a long breath and crumpled into herself, just for a second. Just a single second where she let show she had been scared, was still scared, and pressed herself flush against him.

And in that second he remembered everything. Her laugh, the stubborn shape of her mouth when she dug in her heels about something, Jack sleeping in her arms, the smell of coffee on her lips when she'd wake up before him and kiss him into consciousness. Snow on her shoulders, concentrating on a case, what she looked like when he took her apart.

Everything.

The moment ended. She stepped back, and then around him, and he saw her focus lock immediately on her daughter.

"Marceline," she murmured, and he took that name and almost mouthed it out loud, feeling the shape of it roll across his tongue and press against his lips, wanting to escape. _Marceline. Her name is Marceline._ _"N'aie pas peur. Tout va bien."_

The girl's eyes flickered to him and she stepped back once, eyeing the space between him and her mom. Hotch faltered between moving away to stop her from looking so damn cornered, and moving closer because the rain didn't mask the sound of a car door closing outside and time was slipping out of their fingers. _"Qui est-ce?"_ she said, staring at him, her voice wavering and skin paling except for points of colour high on her cheeks. Then they darted to the gun in Emily's hands, and widened. _"Qu'est-ce que c'est?"_

Four long knocks at the door, the last one trailing off into an uncertain echo.

He was staring right at Emily as the relief slipped onto her face. "Nathan," she said, closing her eyes for a split second, before reaching for the deadbolt.

Hotch stepped around, edging towards Marceline who backed against the wall, and he sorely wished he had his gun because Emily sounded so sure, but he'd learned not to be. The man that entered the cabin, bringing with him the scent of rain and earth as the weather rolled over them, was tall and rangy and in uniform. Official. He also looked… almost frightened. He carried himself like a man scared.

He saw the gun and stopped. Spoke rapidly in a fast-paced French that Hotch's brain tripped over. Shock and anger on his face, confusion. He reached for Emily's shoulder, ignoring Hotch, and there was a tenderness in the gesture that had something sharp digging into Hotch's gut.

Emily didn't even flinch. "Nathan, this is Aaron Hotchner, an American _agent fédéral_." She switched to French after gesturing at Hotch, and her words were low and fast. He caught _Marcie_ once and _danger_ twice with a drop of his gut, and finally the man stopped staring at the gun with his own palm inching to his hip and instead glanced at the door, almost nervous. Almost hunted.

"This man," he said, turning on Hotch, his voice clipped with the sharpness of his accent. "The one that have come for Olivia – he is danger? Immediate danger?"

"Yes," Hotch said plainly, and there was a soft whimper from behind him. _Marceline._ Her existence still spun wildly around his head, suffocating, impossible to comprehend. The moment when he'd tugged the back of the range rover open and found the blanket covered form, he knew everything had changed. "We have to leave, immediately. We can protect her—them—in the States. My team can protect her."

The slow silence that spread from that moment was broken only by the sudden rattling of wind-driven rain against the windows. The next breath Hotch took bit at his throat, and he saw Emily shiver once against the chill it brought.

For an instant, the air felt like winter.

"Oui," Nathan said finally, nodding. He drew his weapon with a quick, "Collect what is required. I will escort you down."

"Okay," Emily said softly, and she stared at Hotch while she said so. She stepped forward once, holding the gun to him, and when he took it the butt was smooth and warm with the memory of her hand. As she passed, her shoulder brushed his arm and he couldn't help but lean into that touch, even as she reached down to take Marceline's hand. "Come on, Marcie. Come help me pack for a trip, okay?"

Marceline didn't answer, just peered once around at Hotch before hiding her gaze behind a fringe of dark hair and a slight bob of her head.

Hotch stood there holding the gun as they left together and it hit him.

They were coming home.

Finally.

 **.**

* * *

 **.**

 _The wolf outran the oldest friend because he was wise but he wasn't quick, and even the wisest could be outpaced. No matter how fast he tried to reach them, it wasn't quick enough. The kindest couldn't keep up because she couldn't bear to leave her friend alone, and because she trusted the others to help her save the girl._

 _And still the wolf came._

 **.**

* * *

 **.**

She packed quickly, utilizing the skills that had been hammered into her from years of being woken in the night to the trill of her phone and JJ's apologetic texts. Marcie watched, silent and shaking, overwhelmed by the weirdness happening around her.

"Make sure you have Pantoufle," Emily said heavily, keeping on her knees as she tugged a warm jacket from its hanger and folded it into Marcie's backpack. "We can't come back if you forget him."

Marcie didn't answer.

When Emily turned to look at her daughter, she was standing by the bed with her eyes glassy and mouth a tight line. "Hey, hey," Emily soothed, shuffling forward and tugging her down into her arms, cupping the back of her head with one hand to pull it down out of line of sight of the window. "It's alright. Maman's okay, you're okay. We're going to go on a trip with Agent Hotchner, and visit some of my friends. Won't that be exciting?"

Marcie snuffled against her shirtfront, the material turning warm and damp. "Can Nathan come?" she said finally, sliding her hands up to cling protectively around Emily's neck. Her fingers were icy points of sharpness against Emily's skin, nail dragging painfully against the bump of her spine. "Pantoufle is lost."

It only took a second to run mentally through the cabin. "He's on the couch, we'll grab him on the way out," she said, scanning the room once more before inching over to the cupboard and grabbing the framed picture of her and Marcie last Easter and tucking that into the backpack. It was all they needed – paperwork was in a bag under her bed, easy to access, and she could simply buy clothes for herself once they were back in DC.

Back home.

"He said he is the _capitaine,"_ Marcie said suddenly, leaning back and examining her with a discerning gaze that was so much like Aaron's that Emily sorely wished this was over and she could show him just how much. If he'd let her – if he could forgive her. "From our _histoire_."

The captain. The leader. The father.

"He is," Emily breathed, dragging Marcie back in for one last crushing hug before their mad flight from the spectre of Doyle began. _The loup._ The wolf at the door indeed. "He is, Marcie, and he will protect you, okay? No matter what, whatever happens, if you can't get to me, you go to him. _Je vous le promets."_

 _I promise you._ It was true. As soon as she'd seen the way Aaron was looking at Marcie in the living room, she'd known that he knew what Marcie was to him. A large part of her was relieved, selfishly, because she knew now that if this went wrong and Doyle got between her and her daughter, she knew who Aaron would protect. His daughter, his child, even if he didn't know her like he should.

She just needed to be sure that Marcie would go to him, just in case.

Emily always planned for the worst.

 **.**

* * *

 **.**

He stationed himself by the window, side pressed against the cool wood of the frame, and eyes scanning the steadily darkening clearing. The trees bowed under the weight of the sudden rain, leaves whipped from their branches, the rain hitting the gravel with enough force to send sprays back into the air. His car was visible, the policeman's only just. Emily's range rover was just the suggestion of a dark shape in the background of the setting.

It should have been almost beautiful, the rain on this mountain.

It wasn't. It was reduced visibility and torrents of water to gutter down the slick roadways, turning them treacherous right when they needed speed.

His phone hummed against his hip and he answered without looking at it, his other hand still curled around the gun. Behind him, he could hear the policeman pacing, breath harsh in the silence broken by the occasional grating of a drawer in the next room and the soft murmur of his girls' voices.

 _His girls._

He shoved that thought away viciously. _No. No they're not._

 _Emily made that choice for me._

But, tantalizingly, the little voice in the back of his head that was suddenly alive with the possibilities he shouldn't even be considering. Emily hadn't spoken a word yet on the subject, they hadn't had the chance, so he shouldn't be thinking of the spare room next to Jack's with _Marceline_ on the door, or school dresses hiding dirty knees and scuffed shoes, or two children pressed against him while they watched a movie together. _A sister for Jack._

 _A daughter._

Dave's voice shook him from his own mind as he answered the phone. "Aaron. Doyle's in France. We just got confirmation. Where are you? Are you alone? The fuck are you doing, taking off in the night like this with some bullshit-"

"Do we have sightings of him?" Hotch cut him off, wincing at the angry _huff_ of his friend's breath down the other end of the line. "When did he get in?"

"Two days ago. Garcia and JJ got together, did some fiddling around, and they know where he's going. Actually, we all know where he's going and you better have fucking beat him there, Aaron, because there's not one person here who is at all pleased with this."

The lies he and JJ had built around the life and death of Emily Prentiss tumbled down.

"I'm with her," Hotch said first.

A pause. "With both of them?" came the slow reply, finally, and there was awe and relief and pain audible in the four simple words.

"Yes." Hotch paused again. "Does everyone know?"

"Morgan punched a wall. Garcia is still crying. So, yes."

"Reid?"

"Hasn't said a goddamn word. Just stuck his nose into Doyle's casefile and hasn't come up for air since. Five years' grief doesn't go easy, Hotch. Especially not… did you know? About Marceline?"

 _Marceline._

He'd gone his whole life with that just being a name and nothing else and all of a sudden, in the space of an hour, it had become everything. "No. How...?"

"You're listed on the birth certificate. As her father. It's how Doyle found them."

And just like that, he was floored. Proof. Impossible to escape, inconceivable proof. _Here's our daughter, Aaron. You don't know her, but here she is. I hid her from you, but I claimed you as hers. And if you survive this, if you manage this most important moment, everything you're not thinking about can be yours too._

"Hotch? Aaron?"

His words came back, slow and thick and flavoured with metal, like the barrel of a gun. Or old blood. He remembered the danger of the moment. "I have to go. How quickly can JJ get us on a plane back to DC? All three of us."

Rossi's laugh, when it came, was heavy with the kind of arrogant smugness that the man only ever got when things were going absolutely brilliantly for him. "How quick can you get to Grenoble Isère Airport?"

"An hour. Perhaps a little more, the roads are slick. Why?"

"We'll be there in five."

He wasn't wholly sure whether to laugh to frown. "Dave, it's a ten-hour flight. And who is _we_?"

All he received in return was more laughter.

 **.**

* * *

 **.**

Another death.

With her daughter on her hip, she grabbed the two bags that were all they would take of this lonely life into the next one, and Olivia Laundry stepped out into the living room and became Emily Prentiss once more. She avoided Nathan's soft, _"Are you sure of this?"_ in whispered French, and she looked to Aaron because he hadn't steered her wrong yet and said in English, "Ready?"

She was hurting Nathan like this, she knew, but that was what Emily Prentiss did. She took the hearts that loved her and she hurt them by dying, by leaving, by failing to ever say goodbye. He'd just be another name on the list of those she'd wronged.

She didn't know how to apologise for that, so she didn't try.

" _Let me carry the bags,"_ Nathan said, and when she looked at him he was holding Pantoufle by one of the rabbit's soft arms, his gun in his free hand. _"Marcie will weigh you down as is."_ She could see what he wasn't saying in the set of his mouth and eyes. _And you don't trust me to take her, do you? Didn't trust me enough with the truth, despite everything I gave you._

She shrugged the bag off and he handed the rabbit to Marcie in return, tucking it neatly between Marcie's tummy and Emily's jacket. His hand lingered, fingers almost tracing the beat of her heart, and it was a goodbye of sorts, she could tell. Once they hit the road, in separate cars, they wouldn't stop until the airport. Then they'd be gone.

Maybe this was a death too, this goodbye. Olivia's last hurrah.

"Okay," Aaron said suddenly. "Time to go. Emily?"

Nathan's face turned unfamiliar and cold and he pulled his hand back as though she'd scalded him. Maybe she had. Emily, not Olivia. Another lie.

"Alright," she murmured, looking away from the man who'd shared her bed but not her heart and to the door. "Aaron, Marcie's car seat is in my car. If I'm travelling with you, we should-"

"I'll get it," Aaron interrupted. "Just get to the rental and get in the back. I'll get the seat. Keep her down."

It was time.

With Aaron in front and Nathan at her back, both armed and utterly determined, they opened the door and left their life behind, stepping into the pouring rain.

 **.**

* * *

 **.**

 _The bravest friend—and that's saying something because they're all brave, so brave—was stubborn and determined and he roared at the wolf that the wolf could never beat him. He was so utterly sure that if was sure enough, believed enough, the wolf could never harm the girl._

 _But the wolf did and still it came. The girl kept running, not alone, and slowly her friends fell._

 _So few left now._

 **.**

* * *

 **.**

As soon as his boot hit the gravel, he was running.

Get the car seat. Get back to Emily and Marceline. Drive. This was no time for a showdown or a confrontation, not with a four-year-old in the crossfire.

He was two steps from the range rover when that's exactly what they got.

Within seconds, the rain had plastered his hair to his forehead and eyes, his clothes to his body. He sheltered the gun with the hunch of his body, tilting his head down to keep his vision as clear as possible. Around him, the gravel hummed with the steady beat of the rain.

And it didn't cover the gunfire, not even close.

It didn't cover the scream.

All it did, when he turned on his heel and roared her name, was hide the person that fell. Behind a curtain of wind and sheeting rain, he couldn't see.

 _Too late again_ , howled the rain, and he ran.

 **.**

* * *

 **.**

 _The girl waited in the rain and with the leader and the magician by her side, and outside the wolf howled his approach._

 _"Don't leave me," she begged the magician, and he just smiled sadly and held her hand._

 _"I'll always come back," he said, and he vanished. Gone to fight the wolf. The smartest of all of them, and she cried to think of how small he would be compared to the beast. And he didn't come back._

 **.**

* * *

 **.**

Even after five years out of the field, her body knew what to do when it heard gunfire.

She dropped. So did Nathan, and when she glanced back at him his eyes were wide with shock and there was a bloom of red on his arm. Not fatal though, nowhere near, and he was already scrabbling towards the car, pulling his gun up, his radio in his free hand. She could hear him barking into it in French, the dispatch on the other side responding, but only barely because Marcie was screaming into the dirt.

A window shattered. Another _whistle-crack_ and so did the windshield of Nathan's patrol car. Gravel sprayed beats later, a steady rhythm of bullets. She pressed herself flat with the rain thundering against her spine, Marcie under her, and counted. _Two bullets at first, one through Nathan's arm and another over our heads. Two for the windows. Another three in the gravel._

 _Doyle favours a SIG-Sauer P226, he always has. He's after me. He'll want to kill me close._

 _Another two. That's seven._

 _It carries twelve._

"Marcie, we're playing another game," she said quietly to the shuddering girl under her, hoping to fuck that she was calm enough to process. "When I say _go_ , you need to crawl as fast as you can under the car, okay? Under the car just in front, you crawl and don't stop."

 _"_ _Cache-cache,"_ came the muffled reply from under her. "Okay."

Another bullet. Eight. Emily closed her eyes and tasted copper. Nathan shouted something, his voice hoarse and broken by the rain. The rain and the twilight gloom that was all that sheltered them.

Where was Aaron?

More gunfire answered her question and Emily stopped counting rounds. Nathan's focus was on her, getting her and Marcie to cover, but Aaron was giving them cover fire now from wherever he was which meant it was time to, "Marcie, go, go, go!"

Gravel cut her palm and Marcie's leg slipped twice as she scrambled forward, a broken kind of rattling moan slipping from lips almost blue with shock and cold as she glanced back over her shoulder at Emily. "Keep going!"

Almost there.

Marcie stopped with a whimper, reaching. The rabbit. She dropped the fucking rabbit.

She actually felt the whistle of a bullet over their heads. Screamed and _shoved_ sending her daughter sprawling, racing, Nathan reaching for her and grabbing her by her skinny arms, dragging her towards the car—

Nathan jerking back silently, falling. Just as silently. Marcie hunched and stared at him blankly as his throat turned to red and painted the car behind them with blood. Then she looked at Emily.

Then she screamed and kept on screaming and still the bullets came.

 **.**

* * *

 **.**

Hotch heard the screaming and moved. It was dangerous. He had no cover. Doyle probably had him in clear sights, even through the dusk and the weather.

But that screaming was Emily first, and then a child, a terrified child, _his_ terrified child, and all he could see was Foyet and Haley and Jack and doing it all over again. So he ran. And he found them. He had no idea where Doyle was, just a vague direction, and Emily was crouched in clear fucking view of him with her palms pressed to the cop's throat and his life spilling out between her fingers.

Marcie was next to her, almost within reach, and Hotch had seen the expression on her face once before.

It was the look of a fear so primal it defied logic or reason and there were only two outcomes of that kind of fear.

Marcie heard him coming and lurched around to face him, and he knew within seconds that she didn't recognize him through her terror. All she knew was that suddenly there was a man coming towards her, gun in hand, and he had no choice but to lunge because he knew what she was going to do.

Too late.

"Marcie!" screamed Emily, but the girl was gone.

Straight towards Doyle.

"Stay!" roared Hotch to her before she could run after her daughter, because Declan was dead and Doyle wanted Emily to pay for that with Marcie's blood no doubt, but he couldn't do that unless he had both of them. Emily looked at him, eyes wide and blood on her chin, and she did the impossible.

She stayed.

And later it would floor him how much trust she showed in him but at that moment all he could think was getting to her daughter before Doyle did.

So he ran. Gun in hand. Rain in his eyes mixing with the sweat and the fear and combining to leave the slick taste of fear in his mouth and throat. His breath rasped, he rounded the house, turning on his heel for a flash of colour, of dark hair, of anything.

On the ground. Jogged to the dash of soggy brown, scooped up the rabbit. It smiled at him with a cross-stitched mouth and button eyes.

When he looked up Doyle was in front of him, and he had Marcie by one of her slim shoulders. She stared at Hotch and he didn't break eye contact with her. He couldn't.

"Lost something, Aaron?" Doyle asked, delight in his voice, and he let go of Marcie. Pushed her gently. The girl twitched, and then ran. Towards Hotch, her eyes on his arms. To safety.

" _S'te plait, s'te plait,"_ she sobbed, and it took a heartbeat of the time between Doyle letting go and her reaching Hotch. Just a heartbeat. Long enough for Hotch to get his gun up and aim it at Doyle's heart.

Long enough for Doyle to pull the trigger.

Her momentum brought her hurtling into his chest and they fell together.

It took a heartbeat of time for Hotch to lose again.

 **.**

* * *

 **.**

 _"Stay?" she asked the leader, and he nodded. You see, he'd never leave if given the choice to stay, not ever._

 _"Of course."_

 _And they waited for the wolf until the wolf arrived._


	5. Solstice

**Chapter Five: Solstice**

 _Quick authors note to say that I MESSED UP GUYS. So I've had to edit the last chapter to add some small bits in - you can keep reading without re-reading the previous chapter (all that's been added is sections of Emily's story to Marcie) - but the tale may make a little less sense. I recommend skimming it to find the italicised story bits, and reading those before moving forward. Also there is still one more chapter to come of this one ;)_

 _Sorry everyone!_

 **.**

 **.**

 _The leader fought bravely for so long but he was no match for the wolf, not without his team. A leader is nothing without those who follow him – no matter how few. And maybe the first mistake the friends had made was splitting up in the beginning. Together, they might have prevailed._

 _But now the girl-spy was alone, through no fault of her own, and the wolf was bigger and more monstrous than ever. She stood in the rain by the side of her fallen leader and she looked at the wolf and saw him for what he was._

 **.**

* * *

 **.**

The rain was cold. He opened his mouth, just barely, almost as though he was about to say something he'd forgotten, but the words were lost with the taste of winter slipping through his lips onto his tongue.

Under him, the gravel warmed. It felt slick against his numb fingers when he shifted his arms.

He drifted into that pooling warmth.

Something pressed against him, small and wet and shuddering.

He opened his eyes and Emily looked back, but her eyes were young and clear and more frightened than Emily had ever allowed herself to look.

Her mouth moved silently and he smiled because she was beautiful.

Then the world snapped back into focus.

"Get up, get up," she gasped, tugging at his shoulder, and his world was pain. " _S'te plait,_ get up! You can't – you have to stop the _loup!_ Maman!"

 _Marceline._

 _Doyle!_

Every movement sent the world spinning and he rolled onto his back, tried to sit, and Marceline screamed. Fingers scrabbling, gravel, _my gun, where did it fall…_

A boot on his chest and he stared into the eye of the barrel, unblinking despite the rain in his eyes. Doyle leaned over and he was smiling, coldly, furiously, and Marcie wasn't running, wasn't going to her mom, she was still pressed against his side like she trusted him to protect her and he was failing.

"Game over, Agent," Doyle said softly, almost apologetically. "Can't wait to see you again."

With the bang came nothing.

 **.**

* * *

 **.**

 _He was secrets. The wolf, this monstrous creature, was made of the secrets and lies of all of the world. By this time, she was very almost the greatest of spies, so there were few mysteries she had not discovered._

 _And the girl was brave in that moment. "Give me back my friends," she demanded, and stepped closer to those big, hungry jaws. The wolf snarled and she scoffed at him, because she was wise enough to know that his secrets couldn't hurt her because she had none of her own. And she was kind. "Give me back my friends and I won't hurt you. You can leave here unharmed, Monsieur Loup."_

 **.**

* * *

 **.**

Nathan's skin turned cold under her fingers even through the blood, and she couldn't tell if it was death or the rain making it so. His radio crackled, chattered in French, whined, but reaching for it felt impossible because if she let go, even for an instant, he'd slip away.

The radio called his name, his dispatch number. They repeated it.

The radio said help was coming.

The radio finally fell silent.

And she was alone, Marcie and Hotch gone _gone_ and Doyle somewhere, and every part of her screamed to stand, to run, to reach her daughter and drag her back into her arms where she'd be safe. To run and never stop because she'd stopped, and look what had happened.

Nathan's pulse slowing under her hands, her fingers too cold, too clumsy. Slipping. Rain turning the blood into pink rivulets that ran down the throat and chest that she'd pressed her mouth against before, staining the gravel and washing it away just as quickly. Rain turning the lips that had whispered quiet exhalations of affection she hadn't returned pallid. Rain turned the eyes that had smiled at her even when his mouth frowned blank and unfamiliar.

He was alive until he wasn't and grieving had to come later.

Everything moved very fast then, in great shuddering leaps of motion. She picked the radio up and calmly, so calmly, informed dispatch that, _"Officer Moreau is down, he is injured, urgent medical and police assistance requested. Please send immediate medical evacuation and police response."_

Then she kissed him one last time because her goodbyes were always flavoured with blood.

And she picked up his gun.

 **.**

* * *

 **.**

 _The wolf thought about her offer, but he was greedy. Secrets are greedy, Marcie. They start small—like a little loup, barely a howl in the distance—but they grow so big and devour everything. "No," he said. "I shall eat you too, unless you can do what your friends could not. Guess my secret. If you are such a good spy, little girl, guess my secret and I will give you your friends back and then leave here forever."_

 _She thought of her beloved magician, so clever and smart. And she thought and she thought and she thought until she knew the answer. It took a very long time indeed. But the wolf was patient, and he waited. She had one guess and she was sure of it before she answered._

 _"_ _Your secret," she said finally, her eyes distant, "Is that you are scared."_

 **.**

* * *

 **.**

She remembered standing over Nathan's body with the taste of his death in her mouth, and then moments later she stepped around the corner of her cabin to find Aaron on the ground with a gun between his eyes.

She stopped.

Everything stopped.

Even the rain seemed to pause in that long, frozen moment; turning everything sharp and focused and narrowing her vision to Aaron, the blood, Marcie hunched against his side and Doyle _DoyleDoyle._

Doyle spoke. He said something and his finger twitched towards the trigger. Aaron didn't flinch. He started down his death and he didn't flinch.

The only movement in that endless moment was his arm tightening around Marcie, pulling her closer to his body. Sheltering.

And with that single, protective, gesture, everything burst into life again.

Rain and wind and the slick smoothness of Nathan's gun as she raised it, aimed it, fired it. No time between her brain making the choice and her hand acting upon it, both moving in perfect unison.

Doyle's gun fired too but her bullet had already slammed into his skull and sent his head reeling back, pulling his shoulders up, his arm jolting. His final bullet hit the gravel, sending a spray of it to clatter against her boots. And he fell.

Over in a heartbeat.

One final death.

 **.**

* * *

 **.**

 _"_ _Aha!" laughed the horrid wolf. "Scared of you? Such a tiny thing!" And he was so amused that he knocked her over with his big jaws and in his excitement, his teeth caught her shoulder. Ow! It hurt! "I'm not scared of you!"_

 _And he wasn't. But there was one thing he was scared of._

 _Secrets are scared of being told because then they're not secrets at all, but stories._

 _The girl smiled. "Not me," she said bravely, ignoring her arm where he'd hurt her._

 _"_ _Me," said the girl's maman, walking into the clearing and aiming her gun. "The last secret." And she fired, bang! The wolf fell, dead!_

 **.**

* * *

 **.**

Two guns fired and neither was the end of him.

Hotch watched as Doyle fell, and then turned his attention to the girl in his arms as the world dimmed at the edges and tried to drag him down. "Shh," he soothed, hugging her close with one arm, and he thought of Jack. "It's okay. It's over now, love, it's okay."

There was blood on her and his hand wouldn't work to wipe it off, a soggy patch on her sodden jacket. He tried anyway, and found that his hand was clenched around something heavy with rain. "Pantoufle," Marceline whispered, reached for the rabbit. His fingers wouldn't relinquish it, clinging, too cold and weak to respond to his brain's signals. But she didn't try to take it. She wrapped her tiny hand around his fingers, around the rabbit's arm, and held on. "He's magic."

Gravel crunched, splashed, and Emily's face appeared. Creased and worried and pale with cold. "Aaron," she said, letting her fear show for an instant as her eyes roved his front, and he realized with a dull thrill that the blood was his. "You're okay. Help is coming, you're fine."

He tried to answer her, to agree, but the words tumbled out as a gasp as a band around his chest he hadn't even been aware of, made of pain and a deep sucking kind of pull, tightened and took with it his ability to breathe. The gasp was wet and his lungs choked on it.

Hands on his front. Emily's. Pressure, firm and unyielding, and her eyes were locked on his and supplicating. The fear vanished, replaced by anger.

"Don't you fucking dare die on me, Hotchner," she snapped, and he coughed out a smile. "We're not done yet, not even close."

He thought of Jack. He thought of Emily in the wintertime.

He thought of Haley.

He needed to know.

"She's mine?" he stated, but it came out a question. Marceline made a soft kind of whimper by his side, her fingers numb points of pressure on his shaking hand.

"Yes," Emily said. Her mouth turned sad and he wanted to kiss that sadness away, smooth away the lines of the last few years with his own lips.

She shouldn't have been alone.

"She's beautiful," he said finally, and then he said nothing at all.

 **.**

* * *

 **.**

 _But her friends were still gone. The leader still lay beaten._

 _The girl almost cried but her maman stopped her. She knew how to save them._

 _Secrets are only secrets until they're shared._

 **.**

* * *

 **.**

Aaron murmured something she didn't catch, the words strangled by his failing lungs, and then he went still. Not Nathan still, not yet, but his eyes turned inward and she saw his mouth slip open, slacken, just that little bit.

It wasn't death, but it was close.

With that, Olivia Landry vanished. Emily shrugged her jacket from her shoulders, folded it, and pressed it down with hands that the rain had washed clean except for the rust under her nails and in the lines of her palms. And she was firm. "Marceline," she said sharply, using her agent voice, impossible to ignore. Her daughter jumped, snapping her gaze away from where she'd been staring with a fixed kind of interest at Aaron's failing expression. "Listen to me. Put your hands here. Like that. Don't cry, not yet, just press down." She waited, hiding the stabbing kind of pain that came with watching Marcie reluctantly release Aaron's hand and let it, rabbit and all, fall limply to the stained gravel.

Tiny hands, white and blue with cold, covered the jacket. Emily leaned her own hands over top, gut twisting at just how small and fragile those little hands were, showing her where to press. "I need to go get the first aid kit," she soothed, tracing her fingers gently along the bumps of her daughter's knuckle, feeling the bird-bones shift under her fingertips. "Don't let go. Don't move. I'll be back, I promise. Can you do that for Maman? Can you be brave?"

"Ouais," Marceline said finally, after a long pause, and took a deep breath that lingered. "Yes, Maman."

"Tell him a story," Emily called back over her shoulder, feeling her knees both pop as she straightened and ran towards the house, almost slipping on the gravel.

Around her, the night closed in.

She couldn't lose him.

Not again.

 **.**

* * *

 **.**

Drifting somewhere warm and quiet except for the soft lull of voices nearby.

 _Summer is over and gone,_ hummed his own voice, and Jack asked sadly why people had to die.

Haley never answered. Summer ended, the warmth faded.

He could smell rain and flowers and he associated spring with the smell of her death, the first death, and the cruellest.

"Emily," he thought he might have whispered, and the voice changed.

"I'm Marcie," said Emily, voice shrill. "Shh. You'll ruin the story."

He didn't want to ruin the story, so he listened and drifted and dreamed.

 **.**

* * *

 **.**

 _So she told the girl spy all about herself. About her friends. About the life she'd had before the girl – when she was a girl herself. She told her how the magician had suffered through a terrible illness but he'd been brave and found his way through. She told her how the kindest friend had also been the cruellest once in order to save a live. She told her about the leader's son. She told her about how she'd loved the leader, loved him more than anything, and he'd loved her. About them having been a family._

 _And as she told her all these things, the wolf grew smaller. From the remains of his secrets stepped their friends, smiling and glad and safe, until finally only the leader still lay fallen._

 _Finally, Maman finished speaking with one final story._

 _She told the girl the leader's name._

 **.**

* * *

 **.**

They sent the _Unité Mobile Hospitalière_ and as the trees bucked and thrashed and the rain swirled under the beat of its rotors, Emily thought that this was the first time Marcie had ever seen such a thing.

Today was a day for firsts.

Today was the day that she leaned on her daughter more heavily than ever before – instructing her to fetch blankets, jackets, anything to keep the bitter rain from leeching the life from Aaron's icy skin any more than it already had. It was Marcie doing so without a complaint, even as her own hair and clothes plastered to her body and left puddles of water wherever she walked.

Today was the day her and Marcie curled up together in the back of the helicopter with a heated blanket over their shoulders and Pantoufle on their lap, shivering and watching silently as two men worked to save Aaron's life. It was the memory of a sheet covered form on the gravel of her drive and police standing over it with their shoulder's bowed.

Today was the day Marcie allowed the nurses to fuss over her without complaint, despite the usual reluctant tantrums she'd throw at the first sign of scrubs. Today was sitting in the private room dressed in stiff hospital pyjamas. Today was wondering if they'd ever seen Aaron again.

It was knowing they'd never see Nathan.

Today was looking up at a shy knock and finding JJ standing there staring at her like she was a ghost. Marcie slept on one of the beds, eyelids purple with exhaustion and arms wrapped tightly around the fluffy form of Pantoufle that the nurse had disappeared with when he was a sodden excuse for a bunny, and returned freshly cleaned and dried.

"JJ," rasped Emily, and her throat burned. "Oh my god, JJ."

Today was staggering up and letting herself fall. JJ caught her, of course she did, because she'd always been ready to.

"Oh, Emily," murmured her friend into her arm, her arms tightening like she couldn't ever bear to let go again. "We're here. We're here."

And they were.

 **.**

* * *

 **.**

 _So she told the girl spy all about herself. About her friends. About the life she'd had before the girl – when she was barely a girl herself. She told her how the magician had suffered through a terrible illness but he'd been brave and found his way back. She told her how the kindest friend had also been the cruellest once in order to save a live. She told her about the leader's son. She told her about how she'd loved the leader, loved him more than anything, and he'd loved her. About them having been a family, the three of them._

 **.**

* * *

 **.**

It was a quiet kind of reunion.

Her team entered the room and none of them looked away from her. Their eyes burned accusingly, and she found herself staring at a point on the floor between them, transfixed by their gazes.

"I'm sorry," she said, whimpered almost, and no one made a sound except for the soft hiss of Marcie's breathing. It sounded harsh. A small part of her mind latched onto that sound with concern, even as her own throat barked out a cough. "I'm so, so sorry."

A hand touched her arm, big and warm and bony, and she knew that hand. She knew it holding a gun or a pen, and she knew it when it moved agilely to create tricks and illusions for them to enjoy.

"Don't be," Spencer said firmly, and then he hugged her and he smelled just like she remembered. Exactly the same.

He smelled like home, and she was finally there.

 **.**

* * *

 **.**

Morgan waited until they were alone.

"I'm really angry at you," he said, and she flinched. Went to respond, but he covered her mouth with a broken kind of smirk. "But you know what? It doesn't matter, Prentiss. Jesus. It doesn't matter. What matters is that you're alive. I can be angry later."

There wasn't really much she could say to that.

"Jerk," she teased, punching his arm gently, and he hugged her too. It wasn't at all like Spencer's hug. It was encompassing and needy where Reid's was just grateful and she sunk into it gladly.

 **.**

* * *

 **.**

Rossi didn't even bother.

"Ah hell, I had an inkling," he said, and his eyes were locked on the bed that no one was talking about yet. "Hey, I'm good at what I do, okay? And I've been picking up on Aaron's tells since before he could aim a gun straight. You gonna introduce the rugrat?"

"Maybe we should wait for Hotch," JJ began quietly, and in that second Emily knew that they knew too.

It was a relief. She'd wondered how she was going to tell them.

"Nope," Rossi said with a gentle laugh. "He's busy getting poked open by docs – and I've been waiting five damn years for this. I'm an old man, I'm done waiting."

Emily was done too.

"This is Marceline."

 **.**

* * *

 **.**

 _And as she told her all these things, the wolf grew smaller. From the remains of his secrets stepped their friends, smiling and glad and safe, until finally only the leader still lay fallen._

 _Finally, Maman finished speaking with one final story._

 _She told the girl the leader's name._

 **.**

* * *

 **.**

When he finally surfaced, the rain was gone and machines hummed around him.

He had vague memories of waking up before this; memories punctuating with Rossi scolding and JJ worrying and Morgan laughing. One memory that stood out strongly of Emily tapping his cheek and ordering him to, "Stop being a shit, Aaron, and open your eyes."

He probably wasn't imagining that last one.

When he finally surfaced, the room was empty except for two people. Turning his head, he found Marcie sitting at the wonky table against the wall, kicking her legs happily and drawing. There was tape on her arm from a blood draw, and he probably stared at that for longer than was needed.

Emily sat next to his bed, but her attention was on her daughter. Their daughter? He'd been sure once, but maybe that was a dream.

"Emily," he said finally, finding his voice. Everything hurt. It took three goes. Worry hit him, and the machine beeped along. She turned and jerked forward when she saw his eyes, her own expression turning pleased and concerned all at once. He had to know. He had to know if he failed; if they were safe. "Doyle?"

"Dead," she said calmly, and pressed the nurse call button. "Are you actually with us now? You've asked me that about five times."

He remembered.

She'd answered every time.

"I'm here," he said, and she took his hand.

 **.**

* * *

 **.**

 _Leader. The brave and the loyal and the loved. So many names, but only one that was secret. As she said the final name, the final secret, the wolf vanished, never to be seen again._

 _Father._


	6. Winter, Renewed

**Chapter Six: Winter, Renewed**

 **.**

 **.**

There were loose ends. Emily hated that she thought that.

Loose ends. Two simple words.

Two simple fucking words.

Those two words encompassed driving to the cabin that was a refuge when she was a child, a home when she was Olivia, and a recurring nightmare to her now she'd become Emily once more. It was driving slowly along the ridge into the drive and ignoring the flapping yellow in the corner of her eye, the tattered remains barely still sporting the dark black _barrage de police_ and the slightest edge of _ne pas_.

It was parking and getting out of her car, walking to the front door, without ever taking a breath or looking to the red stained gravel.

It was closing the door behind her and reminding herself that endings could also be beginnings.

But in the end, those were the easy loose ends. Then there were the loose ends that made her stomach burn, her throat tighten. The ones that woke her at night whispering _is that what I am to you, Olivia? A loose end? So easily swept aside._

Nathan was a loose end, and it burned her.

 **.**

* * *

 **.**

Marceline took to JJ instantly, which was satisfying in a way because Emily had described the girl as 'wary' and she'd proven that ten times over with the rest of them. Even Hotch.

Especially Hotch.

He couldn't help, as he watched his daughter shun his company once more in order to climb into JJ's lap and try to explain the plot of the children's TV show playing on the tiny hospital room set, but wonder if their relationship had taken some irrevocable damage that day in the Alps. If by seeing him bleeding, dying, she'd somehow cemented that in her mind and was forced to relive the moment every time she looked at him.

She didn't look at him much.

Reid sprawled with his useful careful ungainliness into one of the undersized chairs pulled up against the wall, and idly flicked a coin between his fingers as he listened to Marceline chatter in broken French.

"Code mixing," he remarked finally, beaming as proudly as if it were his own child—or Henry—fluidly switching from one dialect to another without missing a beat. "It's actually really common in bilingual children. They'll use the structure of their dominant language, in this case English no doubt due to Emily using it when they were home together, and apply words that they've learned in their secondary language as a monolingual child would English terms. It's fascinating actually, when tested during longitudinal studies, bilingual—"

"Quiet time now, Spitfire," Rossi interrupted, banging his way through the door with three brown paper bags dangling from one hand and a tray of coffee balanced on the other. "Delivery for everyone not being currently fed through a tube."

"I'm not—" Hotch began, but Marceline chose that moment to turn her head and ask, _"Puis-je avoir du?"_ with a suspicious kind of consideration.

Rossi, without missing a beat, passed the coffee to Reid and tossed a bag to the girl with his other hand. _"Petit gâteau de chocolat,"_ he said cheerfully. " _Trouver bon_. Don't tell your mother."

And just like that, Hotch saw her warm to him.

He wasn't jealous.

 **.**

* * *

 **.**

'So how exactly did you get here so quickly?" Emily asked JJ as the three of them—Marceline placidly strapped into the seat in the back and Reid sitting next to her with his cheek against the window and expression absent—drove back to the hotel they were staying at until Aaron could fly.

"Oh, you know," JJ said, waving one hand in a _so-so_ motion. "We have our ways."

"She commandeered the jet," Reid piped up, and when Emily glanced at him, he didn't look her in the eye. He did sometimes, when she wasn't looking at him, but as soon as she turned her attention to him, he'd shut down. Glad to see her, certainly. Comfortable with her?

Not for a long time.

"Are you… allowed to do that?" she said finally, switching her gaze back to JJ and raising an eyebrow. "Strauss was okay with this?"

Silence, broken by a sharp inhale from the backseat. When she looked, Reid had his 'oh shit' guilty face on, shifting uncomfortably in the enclosed space with his knees poking out to the side.

"Strauss died," JJ said heavily, her knuckles white around the steering wheel. "An unsub. Rossi was… it was terrible."

"Cruz gave us the go-ahead," Reid murmured finally. "We're retrieving a US Agent. JJ was… persuasively determined."

The rest of the ride stayed at a muted level of silent, broken by the hum of the radio and the patter of rain on the windscreen. Emily stared out the spotty glass and wondered what else had changed while she'd been dead.

 **.**

* * *

 **.**

There were loose ends.

Hotch healed, slowly, so fucking slowly, and he hadn't even held his daughter yet because anytime he'd almost shyly offer to take her, Emily would baulk and tug her away. He didn't know if it was because she'd been doing this alone so long she couldn't remember how to be a pair anymore, or if it was worry about the wriggly pre-schooler tearing open his stitches or knocking the IV in his arm that stayed her hand.

He wanted to hold her though, oh god how he wanted. To see if she was like Jack, but different. Still a part of him, despite him somehow managing to be even more absent in her life than he'd been in Jack's.

They wouldn't release him from the hospital until his ten days' observation were over, but they let him out for two hours.

And he went with her to the funeral of the man who'd died protecting his daughter.

The wind blew cold around them, chilling him except for the red-hot point of radiating heat on his chest where the bullet wound reminded him of his mortality. He stood among the crowd of blue and black, of dress uniforms and peaked caps, and felt as though every eye were on him, judging. _Why didn't you stop this._

 _Why did you bring this trouble to our home._

 _Why do you deserve to walk away with everything you want while he rots in the ground._

 _He deserves them more than you._

Marcie didn't understand, couldn't understand, so much like Jack at Haley's funeral that Hotch almost dragged her into his arms and held her like he would his son, chasing the confusion away. Her pressed black dress and neat white stockings were pristine, unworn. Death had never touched her life until this moment, and he'd brought it with him.

The little girl clung to her mother, the stability she needed, and Emily stood with her spine straight and shoulders set and didn't bother to hide the tears. He stood by her side, and when the coffin was lowered to the mournful score of grieving, she leaned back into him just slightly and he supported her.

He always would.

 **.**

* * *

 **.**

Marcie didn't make her mind up instantly. She worked her way through these new people that had been suddenly thrust into her life and she one-by-one decided if they were safe or not. It was a caution she'd shown many, many times before, but never to this extent, and Emily worried.

JJ she loved from the first moment, but JJ was a woman and a woman had never held a gun to her head or shot down the man who'd sung to her from before she could walk. Emily had no doubt that Garcia would be an instant hit as well – and thinking of _that_ was thrilling because that would mean they were in DC, they were home, and everything could be… okay again.

Rossi wormed his way into her regard with much the same kind of easy charm he used on everyone else. Before Emily could blink, he'd gone from a stranger to bouncing Marcie on his knee and insisting upon being called _Tonton_ because, "Shit Emily, she speaks French. That's goddamn adorable."

Morgan was too big, too intimidating, too _male_. He got the cold shoulder and Emily knew it was hurting him but didn't know how to approach this new, changed Morgan with the serious eyes and the Hotch-like bearing.

Aaron was both painfully hungry for any attention the girl would give him and at the same time terrified of rejection. Emily feared that rejection too, knew it was entirely possible, because you couldn't just tell a child that the people from her stories were real and expect her to welcome them with open arms. Not a girl like Emily's. Not a girl who knew how to fear.

Reid was… persistent. Shyly persistent, and only when the others weren't looking.

"I'll watch her while you get coffee," he said softly one day, lowering his book and watching her pace the hospital visitor's lounge while Aaron was undergoing another battery of tests. "She'll be fine."

She let him. And when she returned, Marcie was steadfastly staring at a point just to the left of him with the expression she wore when she _really_ didn't want Emily to know how interested in something she was, and Reid was reciting _Where the Wild Things Are_ from memory without looking up from his own book.

She met his gaze when he heard her enter. "And Max, the king of all wild things, was lonely and wanted to be where someone loved him best of all," he said quietly, and smiled.

She found a copy of the book in the children's gift-shop the very next day, and slipped it onto Aaron's bedside table.

 **.**

* * *

 **.**

He found a book by his bed when he returned to his room two days before they could leave, and paged through the brightly coloured illustrations curiously. _Where the Wild Things Are._ He didn't know who'd left it there, but he suspected Reid. Or possibly Rossi.

Maybe JJ.

He scanned the story, absently, wondering what story Jessica was reading to Jack at the moment. He'd spoken to him on the phone, soothed him, reassured him that his dad was coming home, would always come home. _I have nothing now but praise for my life. I'm not unhappy. I cry a lot because I miss people. They die and I can't stop them._ He stopped reading, heart choking and missing a beat at the cold words. _They leave me and I love them more...What I dread is the isolation..._

He put the book down and tried not to shiver.

"Is that the Beast story?" demanded a voice by the door. He turned and found Marcie with her hand wrapped tightly around JJ's fingers, staring at the book. "I… like that story." She paused, uncertain, as though she'd asked for something impossible. "Spencer tells it best."

JJ was smiling and his heart lurched again. _Don't,_ he wanted to cry, but she said, "Oh, does he? Well, I think Aaron tells it very well. Would you like him to read it to you?"

Marcie studied him. He tried to remember how to breathe.

 _"_ _Ouais,"_ she said finally. Then, the words uncertain, like she was learning them, "Yes, please."

Emily's daughter was polite.

He slipped into bed and JJ lifted her to curl aside him, tucking the rabbit between them. And he read to her for the first time and didn't even flinch when the words talked of death.

 _There are_ _so many beautiful things in the world which I will have to leave when I die, but I'm ready, I'm ready, I'm ready._

He wasn't. This was life. Reading to his children, _children,_ plural. This was life.

And he craved every last minute of it.

 **.**

* * *

 **.**

The time after was slow.

They went home. It was bizarre and thrilling and terrifying all at once to step onto the jet again, even if everything was different now.

Fall moved along unhurriedly and Emily relearned who she was. She went to movies with Reid and Marcie. She had dinner with Rossi and Morgan. She went drinking with them all, and met Alex Blake. She liked her, very much.

She found an apartment with two bedrooms and Marcie insisted upon taking the elevator up to their floor at least four times a day, giggling the whole time.

It was rarely lonely. She wasn't working yet, not yet, and every moment they were home _someone_ was there. She didn't mind.

Reid taught Marcie magic. She walked in one day to find the two of them asleep on the living room floor with the scattered remains of some scientific experiment around them. She threatened to never let him babysit again, but only after she'd taken photos and secretly she was gleeful.

JJ brought Henry around and Marcie was standoffish. Neither JJ, nor her son who had inherited both her temperament and her infallible patience, were put off. Finally, finally, one day Emily was stirring her coffee and talking to JJ, and they heard laughter floating from up the hall.

It was a beginning.

Something else began again as well.

A knock on her door. She opened it and Aaron smiled from behind the mask of Hotch. "Dinner?" he asked, holding up a bag of takeout.

How could she say no?

The whole time, he barely looked away from Marcie, and they both knew it was time.

 **.**

* * *

 **.**

They'd decided together to ease Jack into the idea. Marcie too, for all that she was younger and the idea of a sudden _this is your brother_ was nowhere near as earth-shaking for her as it was for the wiser-in-the-ways-of-the-world eight-year-old.

It was two weeks before he broached the idea of Emily simply because how could he even begin to explain that _"Yes, she came back from the dead, but your mom never will."_

It was a month before they introduced Marcie.

It was a disaster.

 **.**

* * *

 **.**

 _"_ _Vous êtes stupide !"_ shrieked the now-familiar wobbly wail of a close to tears four-year-old. " _Maman !"_

"She's talking weird again," sobbed Jack, his eyes blurring with tears he was desperately holding back to keep some kind of composure, his fist white-knuckled around an action figure with the head hanging loose. "And she broke my toy!"

Aaron ushered Jack out of the room, his face grim, and Emily sighed and crouched next to her now furiously weeping daughter. She wasn't sad-crying, she was red-faced and snotty and angry enough to shake.

They were finding out first-hand that both children had goddamn tempers, and Emily was taking that as rock-solid proof that it was entirely Aaron's fault. Clearly his self-control was learned, not inherited.

"Marceline," she said firmly when the girl tried to cling, pushing her away. " _Ça suffit_ !"

Marcie stopped and regarded her warily, the tears ceasing to fall but still blotching her cheek and dripping from her chin.

"Why do you two have to _fight_?" Emily asked, exhausted with the week of constant temper tantrums from Marcie and silent, furious tear from Jack. He was too well-raised to shriek and scream, but he didn't have the control to stop the tears or the anger, even if he tried to hide it. "Is this how you treat your brother?"

Illusionary hopes of uniting the family and finding peace had shattered with the first squealed insult, swept away an hour later when Marcie had realized that the best way to drive this new and frustrating person in her life to distraction was to mutter at him in French, even if what she was saying didn't actually make sense.

Marcie bit her lip and didn't answer, so Emily took her home.

Aaron said goodbye but his face was pale, his mouth tight, and they didn't touch.

Home, maybe, but still isolated.

 **.**

* * *

 **.**

Fall ended and winter blew in, and still they orbited one another falteringly, driven apart by ghosts and memories.

And there was still the continuing war between their children, both of whom had decided that one parent showing an interest in one child was clearly an absolute declaration of favouritism. Hotch had never had to before deal with Jack at this level of jealously, and it was causing strain on them all.

They took them to the park after the first snowfall, and Jack stared moodily at the frozen pond while Marcie kicked the snow in flurries in the air and chattered to no one in particular, most at ease in her own company. Every time Hotch stepped even minutely closer to the girl, Jack would stiffen and glare.

If Emily leaned over to say something to Jack, or reached out to brush snow from his coat, Marcie would turn her back and the chattering would cease.

"What do we do?" Emily whispered finally, when the two children had wandered far enough away that they couldn't hear them. Hotch shrugged, his shoulder brushing hers and setting a wave of hot sparks of shock across his skin despite the thick layers between them.

He'd kissed her once in the two months she'd been home. Just once. It had been awkward and nervous and he'd almost been glad for it to end. They'd forgotten each other.

"I don't know," he said heavily, and Marcie took that exact moment for her legs to fly out from under her as she skidded on a patch of ice and went down with a terrified howl and a thump.

Hotch moved fast, Emily moved faster, but Jack got there first.

"Are you okay?" he asked, crouching and reaching for her shoulder. "Are you hurt? Marcie?"

She burst into shocked tears and Hotch hovered, eyes scanning her legs and hands and seeing no blood. She was fine, he thought, but he was almost shaking with the need to touch, to check, to feel for himself that her skin wasn't bruised and her bones unbroken.

Someone grabbed his hand and pulled him back before he could scoop the girl out of the snow and into his arms. Emily. Her fingers twined around his, and when he looked at her she was smiling as though things were finally falling into place.

So he took a breath. And he looked. And he saw.

"Shh," Jack said firmly, and pulled his sister into a hug, her dark head tucked against his shoulder. "It's okay. You just tripped. I trip all the time, it doesn't hurt long."

"They're okay," Emily said, and squeezed his hand. "We're okay, Aaron."

 **.**

* * *

 **.**

They went home and Aaron helped Jack patch up the skinned patch on Marcie's knee. Emily watched them, her heart in her throat, and the isolation receded. Just slightly.

"Stay for dinner?" Aaron murmured in her ear, as he passed, leaving Jack and Marcie sitting at the dining room table observing each other as though they were finally actually seeing each other. Emily doubted the fights were over.

But maybe… maybe there'd be less now.

So they stayed for dinner.

And then they stayed a little after. Marcie's head began to droop, Jack fell asleep on his schoolbooks, and Aaron lit the fire.

Emily stood, thinking of waking Marcie up, carrying her to the car, driving her home, but Hotch bet her to it. When he straightened and her sleepy daughter hummed and wrapped her arms around his neck, relaxing into his hold, something warm and pooling melted into her stomach and left her breathless.

"Bring Jack?" he whispered, stepped past and edging towards the door. "I'll put her down in the spare bed."

She nodded, throat too tight for words, and leaned down to shake Jack into some sort of consciousness. He grumbled, standing, and she smiled and picked him up anyway, ignoring his soft yelp of displeasure and the gangly weight of him. He was almost too big to carry for her, soon too big for his dad, and the thought of putting him down for the last time was too much too handle right now.

"Don't needa be carried," he complained, wriggling, so she pressed her lips to his blonde hair and smiled into his skin. He paused, dark eyes scanning her, and his father's steady gaze was hidden in those eyes. "But you can if you want," he finally consented, relaxing.

He was asleep even before she tugged the blankets over his shoulders. She thought of Haley doing this for him as a child, Nathan doing this for Marcie on the nights she allowed him to stay for dinner and after, herself doing the same for Declan, all those years ago. Heart aching, she backed from the room.

All so temporary.

A hand caught her hip as she pulled the door closed behind her, and she turned to find herself pressed against the warm chest of Aaron as he wrapped his arms around her and rested his chin on her hair.

"She's asleep," he rumbled, voice resonating through his chest into hers, and she closed her eyes and savoured this. "Stay the night? Please?"

He said _stay the night_ like another man would say _come home_ and there was no hiding what she wanted now.

"Yes," she said, and followed him to his bed.

The whole time they were together, he held her like she was breaking, and she couldn't find the words to tell him this was the most complete she'd been in years.

 **.**

* * *

 **.**

Mid-winter brought dark mornings and darker nights, and it also brought Marcie and Emily coming for dinner more often than not, and staying over a lot more than he'd ever dreamed.

He left Jack with Emily one weekend and went shopping with Jessica. She smiled when he told her what he wanted, and gently steered him away from the displays he gravitated towards.

"Not every girl is the same, Aaron," she scolded, clicking her tongue at the bright-pink bedcover he'd tentatively picked up.

"I know that," he responded hotly, thinking of Emily and her face if she saw the princesses smiling vacantly from the cotton. "But Marcie likes pink. At least, she wears it enough."

Jessica just smiled and delved into the shelves.

Later that evening, when Emily brought the children home and found Hotch and Jessica working together to spread the rabbit-patterned cover over the bed that had quickly become Marcie's, he was gratified by Marcie's stunned _oh_ of delight. She scrambled immediately onto the neatly made bed, holding Pantoufle aloft so he could see it as well.

"Is Marcie gonna stay in here?" Jack asked, nose scrunching. Hotch held his breath.

"When she stays over, yes," Jessica replied without missing a beat, ruffling his hair. "Come-on Jacko, come see the game your dad and I bought you. It's four players, so you can teach your sister how to play it later."

Jack paused, eyes locked on the girl sitting on the bed. Then he smiled. "Alright," he said. "But I'll win, I bet."

"I bet," Hotch parroted obediently, and couldn't help but think that they'd already won. Marcie leapt off the bed, chasing the promise of a game, and Jessica took her hand without missing a beat.

"She's wonderful with them both," Emily said, watching them, her eyes worried. "Is she… what does she think of… this?"

Hotch thought for a moment of how to broach this subject, then decided to channel Rossi and just charge in without thinking. It seemed to work for his friend more often than it didn't.

Then again, when it didn't Rossi had Hotch to clean up his mess.

Oh well.

"She said she'll take Marcie too," he said, and Emily baulked before he could explain. "If you want to come back to work. Alex is leaving, thinking of leaving… there's a spot for you if you want it. And Jessica wants to get to know her niece."

Oddly, he hadn't doubted Jessica for a second when she'd announced that. Haley had been the same. So much love to spare they weren't picky about who they welcomed into their lives, and once that person was there, they were there to stay. Hotch himself was proof of that.

Emily stared. Then smiled, slowly. "Can I think about it?" she said.

Hiding his disappointment, he replied, "Of course. Take as long as you need," and started to move away, following the sound of Jessica expertly defusing an argument between the two.

Someone caught his hand and he stopped and looked down at Emily's fingers twined around his. "I thought about it," she said, stepping into his personal space and kissing him, long and slow and layered with every emotion that were drowning them. "Yes."

 **.**

* * *

 **.**

Time slipped by and things were okay.

She left Olivia behind. They left their demons in the past.

In her third drawer she kept three photos to remind her of the price she'd paid for this life. One of Tsia. One of Nathan and Marcie on her grandfather's porch. One of Declan, smiling shyly.

Never forgotten.

Her and Aaron found a tentative kind of comfort in each other. They didn't profess their love for each other, not yet. Not quite yet.

She was making Jack and Marcie lunch one morning two weeks before she was due to be recertified when they stopped her heart. Hunched over a pad of paper, crayon scribbling busily, and Pantoufle propped against an empty glass keeping guard, Marcie asked cheerfully, "Where's Papa?"

And Emily froze.

Jack didn't. "At work," he said, not even looking up from his book. "He'll be home later, unless they have to go away on the jet."

"Oh," Marcie said. "Okay."

And that was that.

Aaron walked in that night and the first thing Emily blurted out was, "She called you Papa," because it was too big to keep to herself and she'd been bursting with it all night.

The smile that brought was wide and real, big enough to show the dimples he usually hid behind the mask of Hotch, and it stayed for hours. She stayed as well, and lost herself in his touch once more when the children were asleep, and it was different from the other times. There was no disconnection. Every shift of his body was deliberate and laced with sensation, and she almost lost herself twice in the love layered in the gentle sweep of his hands on her sides.

"I love you," she said, looking down on him as he worked within her, and he rocked into her once, twice, and gasped the words out between the rasp of his breath.

From then on, it was different.

It was so much better.

 **.**

* * *

 **.**

The first day of spring, he woke up on the couch with the DVD menu of _Finding Nemo_ playing endlessly on repeat on the TV screen. Jack was sprawled against his chest, arm flung over his eyes and mouth gaping. Sergio was across the top of the couch, tail flicking and muzzle turned up in a smug cat-grin, watching him out of one green-slitted eye.

There was a heavy weight on his legs and when he raised his head and blinked his vision clear of the lingering sleep, Marcie was curled across his knee in a startlingly Sergio-like fashion, Pantoufle hanging from one slackened hand and mouth pressed against her arm. Fast asleep.

He took a breath and the air was crisp, almost scented with flowers, and the moment lingered.

Someone snickered, an almost snorting kind of laugh, and he turned his head back to find Emily standing over him without her mouth laughing and her eyes almost pained with emotion. "Oh, Aaron," she said, pressing the back of her hand against her mouth to muffle the words, before crouched and cupping that hand against his cheek. He stared at her upside-down, still half asleep, and she kissed him.

"Morning," he mumbled into her laughing mouth, and felt it curl and smile against his lips, the memories of everything they'd shared floating through his mind. "I love you."

Marcie muttered something in her sleep, Jack yawned and huddled back closer, seeking warmth, and Emily made a noise that was almost like a sob. Hotch knew that noise.

It was the noise you made when there weren't words to describe your emotions. It was the noise you made when you loved something so much you couldn't think.

 _"_ _Tu veux m'epouser ?"_ she said, still pressing her lips to his, and he still wasn't quick enough with his French despite Marcie's enthusiastic coaching to pick up what she'd said. The only thing he was sure of was that she wasn't asking about rabbits or wolves, those being the first two terms Marcie had been sure he knew and knew well.

"Huh?" he said, blinking. "You know; I really need to learn French if you're going to keep doing this. You're turning the kids against me. Jack was playing hide-and-seek the other day and counting in French just to show off."

Eyes dancing wickedly, she leaned away slightly, hand still playing against his skin. He leaned into that hand, feeling her fingers dance along the pulse of his neck, and when he reached his free arm up to do the same to her, her heart was racing. Hammering. "What's wrong?" he asked, alarmed.

"Marry me," she said, the words tumbling out, and he stared. "Christ Aaron, just… please. I want this. You. Us." Her eyes lingered on the couch, and when he tore his gaze away from her, eight eyes stared back beadily. Jack's wide with shock, Marcie's curious, Sergio's judging and Pantoufle's… well, as emotional as buttons could be.

"Can I think about it?" he answered finally, a choking back a laugh or maybe it was a gasp.

Emil's eyebrows snapped together. "Um, no?" she said, chin setting in a stubborn line. "Wait, what?"

He cut her off, sitting up gingerly and shedding protesting children and stuffed animal in order to grab her and tug her against him, hearts hammering together. "I've thought about it," he whispered in her ear. "Yes."

Yes.

 **.**

* * *

 **.**

Marceline was winter.

She was her and Jack at the kitchen table arguing over whose milkshake was bigger. She was Emily in the morning, still ruffled from sleep, moving in his arms and giving him more than he deserved. She was following Aaron to Haley's grave, her smell hand entwined in her brother's, as Jack solemnly explained about the concept of _'heaven'._

She was family, a broken family somehow reforged. She was growing old with Emily at his side and Jack proving that he was twice the man his father had been, and someone that Aaron could be endlessly proud of. She was growing up in her mother's image, but without the sadness, just as kind and just as stubborn but lacking all the edges Emily had grown to protect herself.

He never regretted any of it.

Marceline was winter, and Aaron had always loved the cold.


End file.
